ajkessler

We have states that have no personal income tax. Not surprisingly, these states are doing fine because they raise revenue other ways.

You're making a huge assumption here that the way someone's mind works is fixed and unalterable. I don't believe this. I think, and have some personal experience here, that you can change the way you think about things, the way you approach things, etc. And you can certainly develop the way successful people look at the world.

I actually think the banana metaphor is excellent: a certain technique may not work for person A, who thinks about the world in A way. But, that person can work to change their mind, to ripen, and eventually see the world close to the way that person B does.

As SoftwareMaven explains below, many schizophrenics experience visual hallucinations in addition to aural hallucinations, but this doesn't seem like a huge stumbling block.

Bigger, I think, is the paranoia aspect. If you really, truly believe the plants in and outside your house are vampires who are waiting to kill you (true story, unfortunately) I can't imagine you're going to put too much faith into your wristband.

Some good points, but I've found this one to be wildly untrue. Almost universally, I've found really successful people want to help other people become really successful. Like his other points, you'll have to initiate and ask for their help, but I've never met anyone successful who isn't willing to give to just about anyone.

You're point is valid, though not exactly contrarian. The decline of point and shoots became pretty obvious when the iphone 3g was released. I'm sure this is why every manufacturer has been diversifying their lineups away from point and shoots over the last 5 years. Sony released a full SLR lineup, including lenses. Olympus has been producing very high quality mirrorless bodies (not exactly point and shoots) for a few years now. Even Fujifilm has followed suit. Nikon and Canon, who probably generate a lot of revenue from p&s sales, have been widely diversified for decades.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-20/facebook-revenue-wi...

I think this would be near impossible to test for though. So many factors affect crime rates across difference societies, and different societies experience wildly different types of income disparity. Intuitively, I imagine places with smaller net income disparity but larger real income disparity (ie a city where everyone is relatively poor but some are destitute) have much more crime than places with larger net income disparity but smaller real income disparity (ie a city where everyone is relatively wealthy, but a few are unbelievably rich).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_dividend

2. Ok, you're right. Some films will certainly outperform some digital. But, the new MF backs will shoot 13-15 stops as well, so who wins? I'd argue that, on average, digital trumps film. I've shot mostly velvia (the most popular landscape/wildlife film for 30 years?) and provia, and those can't compete with even my 3 year old dslr. (see http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/dynamicrange2/ for tests done with an 8 year old dslr)

3. Get a color checker (http://xritephoto.com/ph_product_overview.aspx?ID=1192). No filters necessary, and precise color no matter what lighting conditions. And, you'd be able to eliminate one of those miserable fucking peripherals.

FWIW, going digital has tremendously simplified my workflow and allowed me more shooting time with less dicking around with equipment time, and much better quality prints (and I make really big prints). Cheers.

Because this is the internet, I feel obliged to point out the inaccuracies of some of his other statements:

>>Film was and is to some degree still capable of more resolution, more dynamic range, better color fidelity and less prone to weird errors in the way that a Bayer sensor does<<

First of all, film and digital sensors of comparable sizes have nowhere near the same amount of resolution, dynamic range, or color fidelity. Digital sensors simply murder film in every category. (You can make the argument that B&W film still has some an edge in terms of dynamic range, but considering you're matching it against RGB sensors, I'm not sure that's fair.) Even 8x10 film is now out-resolved by medium format backs.

In terms of color fidelity, there is no film emulsion that will get you more accurate results than properly color-managed digital equipment. Which is exactly why museums and people who care about accurate color reproduction use digital capture.

Finally, the anti-aliasing filters aren't exactly a big deal. Yes, they degrade image quality. Yet, even with them on most consumer sensors, those sensors still massively out-resolve, and produce sharper images, than comparable film. Also note that most medium format backs don't have AA filters.

So, while somebody might like using film (or may need to in certain circumstances) the arguments presented aren't exactly the best justifications for doing so.

>>Instead of measuring ourselves by the size of our Series A or our average profit per employee, let’s measure in lives changed.<<

In an article that talks about the power of software to scale and effect entire populations of people, just how does he propose to "measure lives changed"? He doesn't, really. And how could he?

For example, if you rescue me from a burning building, you've certainly changed my life. But by how much? Do you now get credit for every accomplishment (or bad act) I do from that day forward? Or, if you're polite and let me get the cab we both hail, which allows me to get to my meeting on time, which allows me to close the sale and get the promotion... you've actually changed my life quite a bit, and you'll almost certainly never know about it.

The problem is, many more lives are changed by actions that are seemingly trivial, and often even unseen, than by those that are visibly heroic. Measurement then becomes impossible. Except we've figured out how to measure it. We use money.

If you're getting paid a princely some to design some system that end users will never see, you can be sure it's because the middleman thinks its valuable. He thinks he will be able to change people's lives. And, his belief will be confirmed when the end users pay him. In exchange for money, the end users get something that makes them better off. And that's the entire basis of capitalism.

So, while it's sexy to say that we have a responsibility to better the world at large because of our privilege, don't overlook the fact that by performing some service for pay, you are already bettering the world at large. By definition.

Think of it this way: if you knew you had a high probability of living to 80, you might decide to have fewer offspring so that you could dedicate your earnings to supporting yourself in your later years (children are very expensive after all).

Regardless of whether this hypothesis is true, clearly the number of years you live likely has some bearing on how many children you might choose to have.

http://www.ajkesslerblog.com/a-hell-of-a-eulogy/

Luckily, human beings have essentially unlimited desires. For this reason, there will always be sufficiently valuable things for people to do.

If there is truly nothing valuable for an entire population to do, ie if machines can fulfill every desire we can dream up, it means humanity has finally created utopia.

Even if you presume all those less talented employees are mindless drones, if you can provide the same service with fewer employees, you now have all the value created by that service, plus you have all those extra mindless drones to go produce value someplace else.

As to your second point, I can't imagine that's what he's really thinking. The few talented people who create the twitters, iphones, etcs, are far outnumbered by the millions of less-talented people who actually use those products.

It's strange that someone as successful as Peter Thiel has been in the startup world, a world built on providing value, would make such a statement. What does the number of permanent or semi-permanent jobs have to do with the amount of value being created by something like twitter? If it took 100,000 employees to run twitter as it exists today, would that make it more valuable to the economy? Of course not.

If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own.

Also, he seems to equate increased $$ with increased living standards. By and large that's been historically true, but it's a bit misleading. Even if twitter made 0 money and created 0 jobs, it would still improve living standards. Certainly not in the way indoor plumbing or electricity raised living standards, but it still makes people's lives easier, which, by definition, improves living standards.

RE software, I'd tend to agree with you. The original post makes the case that all patents are bad though, and that they specifically prevent that transmittal of knowledge. That's really what I was responding to.