jonbarker

10 ms·

61.
by jonbarker 8y ago
There's a non-moralistic reason to be concerned with adultery in the case of politicians and public servants, which is that knowledge of it can be used for extortion.
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Populism is 'supporting the concerns of ordinary people', demagoguery is 'apealing to popular desires and prejudices at the expense of rational argument'. Distrust of populism itself is misplaced distrust, since while t
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Populism itself is not necessarily a bad thing if it is in the great American tradition of distrusting elitism and authority. However what we have instead is manufactured populism funded by very wealthy people.
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by jonbarker 8y ago
What matters most is economic mobility, and my definition of that is what percent of poverty level 20 somethings end up in the top income (and savings) brackets by their 30s and 40s. Because it's kind of OK if the bottom fifth of earn
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by jonbarker 8y ago
I like that he is willing to offer generalized advice, even though that is his job. He has one failure, that's one more failure than most of the people listening to his advice, and counts as experience.
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Where it gets difficult to answer the very real internal almost contemplative question of 'am I solving a hard problem?' is when one looks at the history of fluffy rhetoric used by companies solving seemingly easy problems, making
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by jonbarker 8y ago
This reinforces the need to benchmark any 'human expert equivalent' project against the wattage of the human brain.
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Pediatricians I know can basically immediately tell the difference between a kid raised by the TV/phone and one primarily read/spoken to. Obvious differences in verbal ability.
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by jonbarker 8y ago
These four tech giants are upending this centuries old industry... with quantum entanglement.
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by jonbarker 8y ago
A light wave got sucked into a black hole, you won't believe what happened next! I predict a new meme theme of taboola/outbrain style headlines that are actually semi-accurate sciencey clickbait titles. Genius!
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by jonbarker 8y ago
I think the anti-philosophy era you are referring to is actually more like an anti-intellectual, anti-science, and generally populist movement that seems to be picking up steam. The most irritating manifestation of which says that you can&
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by jonbarker 8y ago
That and the facebook pixel.
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Media businesses can introduce or grow subscription revenue, reducing reliance on ads.
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by jonbarker 8y ago
This entire debate reminds me of this classic Milton Friedman video (I think the key difference with Uber, and where they are likely to get in trouble, is that they never made any estimate about how many lives their car experiment would cos
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by jonbarker 8y ago
I agree with Bill Gates' description of platforms as companies which provide tools which are used by other entities to generate more economic value than the value of the owners of those tools. How you measure said economic value is an
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Well it gets defined in the article as 'economic value' not necessarily building businesses using the platform company's features.
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Please humor me this reductio ad absurdam question: So does that make a toothbrush company a platform? Because arguably lots of people are avoiding cavities, and that fact seems more economically valuable than the total dollar value of all
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by jonbarker 8y ago
The tech platform companies are all competing for mindshare in the education market as well. In fact, a FB apologist once went so far as to suggest that the best antidote to FB is readily available FB in classrooms; this way students will
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by jonbarker 8y ago
And now the best proxy for 'the complete truth' seems to be the entrepreneur who built the largest AI enabled platform with the most engaged users. As long as that person is benevolent, we are all OK?
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by jonbarker 8y ago
I would argue that low interest rates in part caused this skyrocketing home value effect for the simple fact that low interest rates have convinced people over the last 30 or so years that borrowing is more profitable than saving (I'm
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by jonbarker 8y ago
"Impact" is the new buzzword of the creative class, aka the knowledge worker. Also, it might be noted, someone else cleans the toilets, that comment from the social good person was just argument by example, and a strange example c
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Probably discrete, but a related question is what constitutes the discrete element? Science just discovered that it's not just neuron synapses as previously believed. Recent discoveries with snails show that reflexive 'memories&
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Old philosophy is fun in the same way old science is fun. Watching someone from thousands of years ago use a process to determine a more accurate or valuable way of thinking about the world, with rudimentary tools, should inspire us to go
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by jonbarker 8y ago
To paraphrase The Simpsons: "In the future, computer programs will be built by labeled data sets. And our job will be to build and maintain those labeled data sets."
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Both have good eyeball grabbing potential but for different reasons. They both fit into a storyline that captures our survivalistic imagination owing to our evolutionary roots. In the former it's "I'd better watch out for d
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Positive cash flow is actually way more important than profit, although you should have both ideally. If you are running a positive cash flow business with good growth and accurate depreciation numbers on fixed assets, you are in a better
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by jonbarker 8y ago
This argument is funny to me mainly because I hear it all the time, about how different they are because they don't want to be profitable. The other thing management is supposed to do is manage cash flow and profit in such a way as to
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by jonbarker 8y ago
I've met consultants who have described it as sort of 'addictive' for people with ADD, mainly because they get to feel like they are in the middle of some big drama, for a short time, too short usually to really own the probl
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by jonbarker 8y ago
I understand the skepticism. I actually try to eat grassfed beef where budgetary constraints allow. In my opinion, grassfed beef today is the most sustainable land -based option given that the person consuming it is fat adapted. If eaten
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by jonbarker 8y ago
Almost quit beef due to the info in Cowspiracy in which I believe they pointed out that if everyone were to switch to grass fed beef there would literally not be enough grassland to support it (this is probably true, with the assumption tha

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