apatters

38 ms·

301.
by apatters 7y ago
There are not a lot of historical examples of a multipolar world that was stable and peaceful. There are competing theories, but there's a valid case to be made that if many nations believe they have a shot at being #1, they will inevi
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by apatters 7y ago
I'm just a layperson, but from what I understand, the prevailing theory about memories in psychology is that they have active and dormant states. These correlate roughly with short-term and long-term memory and are even related to diff
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by apatters 7y ago
It's a mystery to me how the gaming industry exists in its current form. I subscribe to Humble Monthly and occasionally buy a Humble Bundle. This all costs me $20-$30/mo and I get my hands on enough good games to last me a lifetim
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by apatters 7y ago
I think you're making it sound less scary than it actually is. The study you linked looked at adolescents who used cannabis once a week, and found that they suffered a permanent decline in IQ. Once a week is not "binge usage.&qu
305.
by apatters 7y ago
I just remember reading (or hearing) that it was a tough business because demand for new releases was very high, and then tapered off quickly. So a lot of DVDs would only get rented out 2-3 times and then would never be needed again, if you
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by apatters 7y ago
I guess if I was writing the headline for this article I'd go with something like "Europa's ocean may have chemical similarities to Earth's." It gets at the interesting implication of the discovery without being too
307.
by apatters 7y ago
First sale doctrine protects your right to rent out a copy that you own to one person at a time. Since movies are in high demand when they first come out and the demand tapers off quickly, this alone doesn't create a very appealing eco
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by apatters 7y ago
Subscription furniture has actually been around for decades. The market is mostly corporate. It's useful for relocation packages or something and the customers aren't very price sensitive. For example: https://www.cort.
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by apatters 7y ago
A rational/efficient example of where renting might be a better deal for you is if you don't have access to wholesale prices and someone else does. They buy at a discount and then they rent out to you at a price which makes it che
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by apatters 7y ago
Renting things is a financial tool and it can save you money. The calculation is simple. You estimate the difference between how much something costs and how much you can sell it for once you're done using it. That's your real cos
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by apatters 7y ago
None of that directly describes business (or consumer) value. It is mostly a recitation of information technology statistics. If you look at the period of say 1990-2010 there was an absolutely insane ROI on human capital invested into IT. A
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by apatters 7y ago
> Humans have faced lots of problems over the millenia, but the reality is that our lives continue to improve as a whole..not get worse. I think this is no longer true. Life expectancy is actually on the decline in developed countries, d
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by apatters 7y ago
I think the key is how social networks are used. You notably met your spouse online, which means at some point things presumably transitioned to an offline relationship which can't be terminated just by hitting a block button. Online n
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by apatters 7y ago
This is more readable than many news websites I've come across
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by apatters 7y ago
As a counterexample, I attribute much of my success to being a compulsive World of Warcraft player in my 20s. True, founding and being the Guild Master of a hardcore raiding guild wasn't great for my ability to focus on my real job. Ma
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by apatters 7y ago
This is a good argument in favor of federation. Allow local nodes with local users to define their own content policies. Other nodes can choose to federate with them or not. Cultural distinctions are thus preserved.
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by apatters 7y ago
I upvoted your comments because even though I don't agree with everything you're saying, I think the discussion is valuable, especially the comparison of the music and movie industries. You noted that music artists have a tough ti
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by apatters 7y ago
I think the most probable outcome would be that they would fine Facebook.
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by apatters 7y ago
The article uses the terms power and freedom, and explicitly defines them. > I would define power as the ability to make other people do what you want; freedom is the ability to do what you want.
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by apatters 7y ago
> I was writing on Medium because it ranks well in Google Is this the main/only reason people blog on Medium, or are there others? It seems like something that would be easy enough to develop an open source, self hostable version of
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by apatters 7y ago
All it takes is a compelling case that eating a plant-heavy diet is in my best interests, which is easy: plants taste great and they're healthy. My contention is with the vocal minority of extremists who evangelize plant- only diets a
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by apatters 7y ago
> I've spent my 20s constantly oscillating between going broke trying to build a scalable startup and earning good money by working freelance. I think the "scalable startup" fixation is the worst legacy of our industry. Th
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by apatters 7y ago
On that note, an article was just posted on here about how Chinese companies are going bust left and right: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19858288 While many people have stopped believing this, it really is true that
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by apatters 7y ago
So here was my take. Fitness influencing is a microcosm representative of the bigger picture on Instagram. IG is tailor made for advertising. It's visually sumptuous, low information density, one-to-many communication. Surfing IG doesn
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by apatters 7y ago
This is really the secret to life as far as I'm concerned, the idea of getting to a decent steady living state which doesn't take too much of your time and energy to maintain. You can combine it with the principle of geoarbitrage
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by apatters 7y ago
It's a normal thing all over the world. The answer unfortunately is yes, most people are shallow and vindictive in a negligent sort of way. There's a saying that great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss things, and small m
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by apatters 7y ago
You're too hard on yourself. I know lots of people who went to elite universities and haven't done any really cool stuff. More broadly, from an economic perspective, there are outliers, but most people only move one income quintil
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by apatters 7y ago
They don't eliminate inequality, they just facilitate a game of musical chairs. America has a very high and very well documented level of income inequality. It's also well documented that the people at the top often change. There&
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by apatters 7y ago
I think socialism is problematic for other reasons, but there's nothing nuts about the link between social inequality and mental illness, which is well documented. This might be because inequality contributes to feelings of isolation a
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by apatters 7y ago
No, except in certain cases. When the market is large you can almost always carve out a stake. You already know the demand is there, you can get a share of it by reaching people who haven't heard of or don't like your competitor,

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