viola11

That's an open research question (follows from its casual encompassing of all scientific statements), and more funding is needed to make progress on it.

So in other words rural India was saved from becoming the robot slaves of social media activists by those very same activists?

That's a clever optimization that is. They are providing you with the shortest route, thus improving your user experience, isn't it great?

I think it went well? For an article essentially about the data taking it was surprisingly vague on how the actual observation went...

I expected a project dedicated to combating light pollution, or possibly saying where the closes dark sky was. Got severely disappointed.

Look, the details of FBs operation are certainly not a concern for the consumers: the consumers have the right to get their privacy respected and there is no right FB can invoke to counter it.

The truth is that people do pay for messaging on the internet (email), just not the huge user base a popular free service can get.

As things stands, it does look like the only way to make lots of money out of huge user bases is by selling targeted ads, which in practice seems to be a rather unsavory business that shouldn't be trusted.

Instinct is indeed unfortunate, and I think it is misleading to the point of hilarity too! The notion that sizing a market (as others have mentioned: a Fermi problem) is the same kind of knowledge as that which makes babies close their mouths and wave their arms when immersed in water? Venture investing truly is child's play :D

Let "sizing a marked" mean "estimating the number of products that can be sold to a given population of persons". An very precise estimate of this number is currently very hard to provide, but giving an order of magnitude estimate is clearly a Fermi problem. Note that the difficulty is providing an accurate and tight bound, not an accurate but imprecise one and that the latter might be valuable too.

Solving a Fermi problem requires estimating a series of numbers from everyday experience. One then multiplies these number together in a mechanical fashion, which could be done in a "ready-at-hand" way by use of a tool. Evidently the process invariably requires contemplating one's every-day experience, and since ordinarily that experience is simply lived this meta-action is an act filled with "presence".

By the way, the problem of capitalism is solved, and the solution shows that it will allocate capital optimally; this is one of the main arguments in favour of capitalist systems.

The problem that the social reality in which we live only partially approximates capitalism (see: non-profit organizations) is the big problem economists, and anyone else using classical economic theory in the real world, struggle with.

No, in the highlighted section he is explicitly saying you can't figure out how big the market is by reasoning and the best you can do is guess.

In fact, it is a bit stronger than that: he states that the only knowledge that can be used is instinctual knowledge, but since instincts concerns things like what smells indicate spoiled food and legless that animals are dangerous, you don't have any relevant knowledge at all! The best you can do is baseless guessing, though after having gotten funding and done a bit of work you might have some basis for your estimate (there is a caveat that instincts dominate estimates early in the start up process).

The summary ars provides does seem to be what he strove to say, but since two people can easily disagree on what is to be considered "obvious" even that statement allows for less predictive power that seems reasonable.

"Who would have been foolish enough to squander the money, lives and resources needed to travel to and explore the New World?"

You can only argue that the exploration of the Americas was a good affair if you ignore the cost of all the pillaging and killing and deaths and slavery... If you include the inhabitants of the Americas when you judge the benefit of the "exploration of the new world", I'm not sure it ends up being a net positive for several centuries.

The pie charts in this figure must be the most misleading I've ever seen; grey slices on colourful circles: https://d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/the-definitive-guide-t...

This should probably have a (2007) in the title, its only two more years until it turns sixty!

Reading the supplementary material (since that isn't paywalled) I not that these are not IQ tests, but results from mathematics and reading comprehension tests.

I also found this little thing that implies that the score distributions aren't symmetric (I think):

"There is no clear pattern in the male to female ratios at the bottom 5% of the math distribution. This ratio is different from one in only 15 countries but in some countries it is larger than one and in others smaller. On the other hand, at the top 5% the ratio of boys to girls is larger than one in 35 countries with the highest estimated ratio in Korea (2.55). In these 35 countries, boys are clearly over-represented at the top end of the math distribution. The quantile differences at 5th and 95th quantiles confirm the same finding, with no clear pattern at the 5th quantile but positive and significant differences in all but five countries at the 95th quantile. "

Doing a quick test, I took some random normal numbers with variance ratio 1.4, and found that the variance ratio is not very sensitive to if I calculate it using the full sample, the bottom half or the top half. In other words, for a normal distribution the reported ratios for the 5th and 95th quantile should be the same within the errors, but this is never the case for mathematics so the scores simply aren't normal.

That's a charge that applies equally well to the standard formulation and I made this comment just to say that it IS cool you can deeplink the Feynman lectures!

So the reason that they spy on foreign companies is that they hope they can catch bribery going on (if they had credibly evidence without the espionage they wouldn't need the espionage in the first place, thus there must happen that they spy on innocents).

Once they find evidence of corruption they confront the government that is buying, not the one that could punish the company. Clearly the crime of corruption is not of importance to the CIA (why would it, they use it to recruit, and they aren't a police anyway).

Indeed they are competing with existing taxi services, but not as a taxi company, but rather as a "ride share", despite providing a taxis service, and branding themselves as such.

Given that they had the choice between acting and probably-illegally, I can find no reason to act questionably except profit expectations. This in turn means that Uber can reasonable be expected to have come to the conclusion that their technological innovations alone do not provide sustainable growth in the taxi market.

"Instead, as citizens, we should look at the regulations we have and ask if they still serve to protect people as they once did, or if they now exist to protect political and business interests."

Those are grand words for defending a taxi company that uses an app with driver + passenger ratings as basis for arguing that it is not a taxi company and that it shouldn't need to employ actual drivers.

Are you sure you didn't think about copyright law or investor state settlements laws when you wrote your comment?

Defending law violations only by arguing that they make "the economy" more efficient is not very convincing.

Especially in this case since the real innovations that Uber brings in terms of ride allocation are not incompatible with paying taxes and insurance. Rather, the technical innovations of Uber appear to in themselves not be enough to actually compete with existing taxis, hence why the second innovation of actually breaking the law under the guise of technology is so important.

Uber has clearly pivoted into a taxi service, and as such it must compete on price, but somehow the fact they have an app for hailing cabs means they can be a taxi company that doesn't employ their drivers? How does that argument really work?

Seems like they have like the maker put up a new cover image, pretty sure that stupid cassette tape wasn't the official cover image a week ago.

That's a great comment! I am in awe of the cynicism and misanthropy it contains. Machiavelli himself would go "Dang, that's dark dude".

- Man, Uber just perfected self driving cars and closed my account with them, what am I gonna do now? - I hear prostition is still around.

- Shit, some kid in Senegal just released a database server that can create a sensible schema from an excel sheet, even creating translation layers between the insanity the end user put in and the sensible internal representation! There are no DBA jobs left in the world, what am I gonna do? - I heard those rich actors in Hollywood have acquired a taste for their own "best boys" with strong "grip"...

The could equally well be forced to work certain hours before as well, by Uber deciding to just give fares to them during certain times.

Historically the exploitation of workers has lead to the workers organizing and protesting for better rights in various ways. Usually involving in the formation of unions and creation of legislation ensuring rights for the employees. Or revolution, armed insurrection and stuff like that.

Honestly, the fundamental situation is not new, only the particulars are novel.

For one, the franchise contains multiple people so there is most definitely managerial work going on. I also imagine franchise owners possess some freedom in how they manage stocking and of various supplies, and might be free to choose suppliers.

But isn't ũbers thing is that they are not taxis? Supposedly this has great benefits for Uber and nebulous consequences for their drivers.

For that argument from privacy to work you need to provide reason for why flying is the only acceptable form of travel. Or why it is only acceptable to "get away" to locations to which flying is the only possible means of travel.

Realistically speaking, the only traveling you can do with perfect privacy is that which you do without involving others. If you use a travel service your desire for privacy becomes an imposition on the free speech of others.