MaxScheiber
This isn’t strictly true. Europe has négociants, who buy grapes from smaller growers to make wine from (to be fair, often alongside their own vineyard holdings).
> But then again, who cares for American wine (certainly not the Euros).
Huge fan of Old World wine here. With that said, the Americans are producing remarkable wines these days. For my palate, I enjoy Sonoma and Willamette Valley. Even tasted blind, top critics have preferred California to France — look up the Judgment of Paris!
I wouldn't stick around for this one if I were still in Florida.
http://t-t-travails.blogspot.com/2008/04/left-leaning-red-bl...
Additionally, I'm not going to pretend that Greek life is 100% free of douchebaggery. Some people in fraternities do bad things to other people, or harbor bigoted worldviews. I feel that you grossly overestimate the proportion of people who do. To address the racial and sexual homogeneity point, I'm fairly confident that every single fraternity at my alma mater had individuals of color and homosexual individuals. My own certainly did.
I'd also like to point out the obvious blanket statements you've made about the demographics and attitudes of fraternity members. However, I really don't think anyone or anything can budge your opinion.
I'm not certain I agree with #3. It seems to defeat the purpose of a strong type system. Either way, it can be very nice to express meta-level constructs in a matching object-level type. For example, if the language you are writing a compiler for has an int32 datatype, but you use an int64 in the language you're writing the compiler in, you'll need to simulate overflow. It would just be easier and safer to use an int32 in both places.
These days, I'd recommend Menhir over ocamlyacc unless you have a very specific use case that the former breaks on but the latter works on.
I can replicate this behavior in Chrome on Ubuntu, Chrome on El Capitan, and Safari on El Capitan.
In other words, I submit that it is significantly easier to fully understand the architecture, as sologoub is referring to, with a technical background.
It seems like your CS minor and Rails experience gave you the necessary background, which supplements the soft skills that PMs also need.
A lot of my friends and peers who were "interested in technology" but did not understand software engineering took jobs as PMMs, venture capital analysts, or investment banking analysts on a TMT desk. I think this makes sense; I can't see them being very good in a PM role.
It wouldn't surprise me if this were somewhat different for MBAs, though.
I wonder if you would have any luck escalating this to Chesky, Gebbia, et al. The Airbnb founding team really seems to take pg's advice on start-ups seriously. I'm sure that they're huge proponents of delighting their users, which your experience obviously isn't an example of.
[0] http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/01/da...
[1] https://www.palantir.com/2015/01/housing-homeless-veterans-w...
If you're interested in game show cheating scandals, I also highly recommend Major Fraud, a documentary about a cheater on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The summary of that one is an audience signal via coughing.
I always thought, however, that the big issue with steroids was the role that athletes play in the lives of children and teenagers. It's really not okay for high school athletes to use steroids. I was under the impression that professional athletes using steroids influences budding athletes to use steroids both directly ("I can get to where Barry Bonds is by using steroids") and indirectly (feeling pressured to use PEDs in order to compete). I seem to remember this being a controversial topic in the news 10-15 years ago.
Steroid use in professional bodybuilding isn't as big of a deal as steroid use in professional sports. While part of that is attributable to the goals of those respective fields, another part is attributable to bodybuilders not being widespread role models in the way that baseball or basketball players are.
Even with that, Zuckerberg isn't 100% focusing on the Facebook core product; look at the Connectivity Lab, for example.
I wish this didn't have to be so important, since it feels like a Cold War relic, but that's just how things seem to be these days.
Get away from the windows and duck behind something solid.
Ah yes, you're correct; thanks for reminding me. Their (arguably) more well-known cards (Green, Gold, Platinum, and Black) are actually charge cards. I think you're able to explicitly mark a an item you've purchased as something you'd like to pay for over time, but otherwise you are required to pay in full on those cards. The rest are true credit cards, such as Blue and SPG.
Most people would agree that the most intelligent way to use a credit card is to treat it as a debit card and never incur a balance. Instead, you'd pay each month's bill in full. This way, you pay no interest on your debt; in fact, you are effectively incurring zero debt. Moreover, a lot of credit cards offer rewards programs in terms of cash back or "points" as a percentage of your expenditures. With some mixing and matching of cards, you can easily get 2-3% cash back on your aggregate purchases, or rack up some free airline flights.
I actually find this to be a huge moral gray area; the reason that Visa, Discover, and MasterCard can afford to pay out handsome rewards is partly because of the financially illiterate charging more to their credit cards than they can afford to pay off. [1] I don't have the exact numbers on me, but I think interest versus merchant fees was about a 67%-33% split in terms of credit card company revenue. (American Express is an exception because they do not allow you to carry a balance on a lot of their cards; they will report your account as delinquent and terminate service.)
Otherwise, as other posters have mentioned, credit cards offer fraud protection. Cards aimed at people with good credit scores often come with other nice benefits, such as additional reimbursement if an airline loses your bag.
[1] There are valid reasons to place a huge charge that you can't afford to pay off immediately. Emergencies do happen, for instance, and it's really great to have a line of credit for that situation. But then your credit card serves the same purpose as a traditional loan.
Contrary to the WSJ article, I don't think Palantir does any data mining. Instead, Palantir's core competence is taking a customer's existing data and appropriately modeling it in their software.
I disagree somewhat, as there is certainly a regulatory cost. Now whether FINRA is stringent enough is an entirely different question, and one that would be more fruitful to discuss.
Moreover, you'll see toward the bottom of my original comment that I don't think misleading advertising is a good thing. My comment mostly dealt with the author's discussion of consumer attention as a resource, to which I strongly disagree that there are externalities.
> Advertising is not an issue of prisoner's dilemma (in which two players who benefit from cooperation are driven instead by rationality towards destructive outcomes).
I defined cooperation to be a firm not advertising and defection to be a firm advertising. It certainly seems like the definition of a prisoner's dilemma to me under the way I'd set it up. But we're free to disagree. I agree that this is an asymmetrical information issue, but that quite literally applies to the entire business world.
I would posit that the advertising market is actually quite efficient as opposed to being a market failure. Let's examine a paragraph from the market failure section:
> Movie theatres, cable channels, phone apps, bill-board operators, and so on price the sale of your attention at what it takes to extract it from you - namely, how easy it is for you to escape their predations. This is often much lower than the value to you, or to others, of directing your attention to something else.
The author makes the implicit assumption that advertisements automatically garner 100% of our attention. They don't. When was the last time you went to a movie theater before the previews started, sat silently, and stared at the advert loop? You probably have never done that! Instead, you give your attention to your loved ones or your phone. And maybe you'll watch the previews, but if you're even somewhat into watching newly released movies, those add value to you.
Some advertisements do capture our attention, and those are priced appropriately. Super Bowl commercials cost more on a CPM basis than a commercial to be aired during the Walking Dead, which in turn costs more than an Instagram sponsored story. This is the sign of an efficient market, not a market failure.
Moreover, people do avoid advertisements when they deem it necessary. Some people buy the premium versions of iPhone applications, some people only watch new TV shows on Netflix, and some people pay extra to watch live sports events on an ad-free Internet stream. Again, this is the sign of an efficient market, not a market failure.
You could, instead, possibly make the argument that advertising is a prisoner's dilemma. Perhaps the world would be better off without advertising. (I'm not even sure that this is true, given that advertising does benefit people.) But if there are no advertisements and a single company ran a TV spot, it would be at a huge competitive advantage. So everyone runs marketing campaigns. I really think this benefits the consumer more than the author gives credit for, however. Marketing is the field of creating value for a specific segment of the population, who in turn will enter into a long-term relationship with your firm and give you economic value in return. Advertising is an important part of this.
Also, to be clear, I don't advocate for marketing strategies that themselves are disingenuous. Moreover, there are perfectly valid arguments to make that inference-based advertising are immoral, or that Internet tracking is immoral. But the author is painting with absolutely massive brush strokes against the entire field of "advertising," and I feel the need to strongly qualify his argument.
There's a lot I want to say about this piece, because it seems that the author fundamentally misunderstands marketing. The entire bit about advertisers charging consumers directly is a terrible business idea, for example, for the same reason that we have grocery stores and shopping malls. However, I don't really want to spend all afternoon on a point-by-point response.
It looks more like he's trying (EDIT: or his funding foundation is trying) to talk up his research, which is understandable.