samlevine

11 ms·

61.
by samlevine 9y ago
There are a number of ways of paying for a social network. Among them: - Ads - Subscriptions - Loss leader for another product - Microtransactions Facebook does ads. Subscriptions hurt network effects. Google+ ran into a brick wall of netwo
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by samlevine 9y ago
The same way the Germans do, they save money. Rising housing prices have played out the same across the Anglophone world. It's not sustainable as a means to get the lower classes into the middle class, because the higher prices rise th
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by samlevine 9y ago
> I also expected, as a result, a correction in the price of housing to actually realistic levels. Housing prices were realistic. We know this because most of the Anglophone world has had similar experiences with housing prices without t
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by samlevine 9y ago
The US is pretty darn good at manufacturing and has gotten stronger with global competition. Even if US geopolitical dominance fades, it's hard to see this changing this century.
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by samlevine 9y ago
Hopefully not what was done to open up imperial China to the opium trade.
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by samlevine 9y ago
A war with China over Taiwan, for example, wouldn't be a total war (at first, god willing). But it would be one that would have the US pitted against a foe with better technology than we've ever faced, even if they can't easi
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by samlevine 9y ago
Because Amazon could build their own city if they had to. The US has a lot of land, power and freeways leading to international airports.
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by samlevine 9y ago
> I'm not sure I'm following your points. You're moving back and forth between enormous historical and current problems and sweeping the platitudinal meat under the rug. The problems America faces are largely controlled by
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by samlevine 9y ago
The author correctly points out that the Bay Area's problems are political in origin, and that tech companies and technologists in general have been reticent to get dirty with politics. However, their solution, putting tech companies u
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by samlevine 9y ago
> Techies will complain that trivial problems of life in the Bay Area are hard because they involve politics. But they should involve politics. ... SNIP ... > In a world where everyone uses computers and software, we need to exercise
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by samlevine 9y ago
> LIES. ALL LIES. It's difficult to do marketing for things that aren't yet in productized form without them being aspirational to some extent or another. Case in point, the public unveilings for the Kinect and original Mac wer
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by samlevine 9y ago
The parent comment suggests becoming a billionaire through a short. The people who bet long are likely leveraged to some extent, and if they have enough of a BTC portfolio to allow a short against them to make you a billionaire it's no
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by samlevine 9y ago
Assuming someone shorts BTC and it crashes, how are they going to collect when the other parties are likely heavily invested in BTC to begin with?
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by samlevine 9y ago
If someone else is running code you can't read on your device where you don't have root, it is someone else's device. Failing this, we rely on the hope that companies can make more money off protecting our privacy than they c
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by samlevine 9y ago
Seattle's modest light rail system is going to end up costing $50 billion. Ultimately Americans are just really bad at infrastructure and if you're not willing to spend 10x what other developed countries are you're not gettin
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by samlevine 9y ago
San Francisco's population density: 18,573/sq mi Manhattan's: 71,998.9/sq mi It's difficult to look at this without thinking that the initial problem to be solved is density in the urban core. Eventually, yes, you n
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by samlevine 9y ago
We can apply Kant's categorical imperative to lots of stuff. Some people don't want to have children. If everyone chose to not have children the human race would face extinction. This does not imply that we must (or more important
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by samlevine 9y ago
Singapore or Zurich are about as close as you're going to get, depending on what you fancy in a country.
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by samlevine 9y ago
China is doing a pretty good job of building giant cities without much local consultation.
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by samlevine 9y ago
People fight wars where millions die and billions of dollars are spent so that they aren't told what to do by another group of people. Colonizing Mars is, by comparison, vastly cheaper in blood. Just not in treasure.
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by samlevine 9y ago
> It makes sense, as a country you wouldn’t want US companies taking over your social media. Not having to build your own Facebook (and WhatsApp, etc.) means that you can build something else that can (eventually) compete internationally
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by samlevine 9y ago
> will we reach a point where cameras are digital paintbrushes that construct a human-pleasing image out of hints from the real world, rather than tools that capture the real world? We're all stuck in Plato's cave. Aperture is
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by samlevine 9y ago
It's the best way to raise socially and economically successful children in the modern era. It has a good side effect of giving otherwise ineligible bachelors the ability to form families and thus do something other than die in wars an
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by samlevine 9y ago
Journalists aren't even SMEs in most cases. If they're good, they get enough depth to explain what SMEs are talking about and to understand the difference between a huckster and an expert. And, amazingly enough, the SMEs themselve
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by samlevine 9y ago
It's hard to bootstrap some models without a lot of money. Even with money, it's not obvious there is a market until people prove it via piracy. For example, Crunchyroll is the least terrible anime streaming site and they got star
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by samlevine 9y ago
> The view from the pinnacle, people counting the dividends on the checks that they inherited is that they're the job creators, and everyone else is dispensable. This company just found out that is not the case. The solution to this
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by samlevine 9y ago
Facebook is worse than Fascism and Communism? Seriously?
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by samlevine 9y ago
> The Kobe Bryant workout routine features a hefty mix of track work, basketball skills and weightlifting. His off-season workout has been called the 666 program because he spends 2 hours running, 2 hours on basketball, and 2 hours weigh
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by samlevine 9y ago
> Housing, ... supply limited The US is incredibly sparsely populated, there would be billions of residents if we were as dense as Western Europe. We do have limited supply of housing in artificially low dense cities that have good jobs,
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by samlevine 10y ago
Simple, robots with guns to prevent the humans from guns from takings your stuff.

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