sethg

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331.
by sethg 16y ago
But if you look at the whole of Amazon, not just Kindle, the company is all over the place. It sells an e-book reader! It sells books! It sells other consumer products! It provides a marketplace where other people can sell products, ev
332.
by sethg 16y ago
Summary: Nokia is the General Motors of the cellphone industry.
333.
by sethg 16y ago
To paraphrase Churchill, Nokia’s deal with Microsoft was the worst strategy they could have come up with, except for all the available alternatives. It’s a partnership born out of mutual desperation. Nokia needs an OS that doesn’t suck to
334.
by sethg 16y ago
Apple looks for market segments where they can sell things at high margins, and abandons the segments where those margins are no longer sustainable. Dell laptops start at about $400. The MacBook starts at about $1000. If you only want t
335.
by sethg 16y ago
The “burning platform” inspirational stories are probably based on an actual disaster: “Piper Alpha was a North Sea oil production platform operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Ltd. The platform began production in 1976, first as an
336.
by sethg 16y ago
A fiber-optic line connected to a cell-phone tower costs pretty much the same amount to maintain, regardless of how many bits happen to be flowing through it. By contrast, water and power companies actually have expenses that scale accordi
337.
by sethg 16y ago
There is a demand for medium skilled jobs. E.g., I see lots of ads for careers in “medical billing and coding”, which is not the sort of work that requires a bachelor’s degree, but you can’t just hire someone off the street to do, either.
338.
by sethg 16y ago
Since Israel and Egypt made peace in 1979, the US has sent Egypt over a billion dollars per year in military aid. ( http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/us-aid-to-e... ) The Egyptian people have wanted a more democratic governme
339.
by sethg 16y ago
They own a whole bunch of businesses ( http://www.iac.com/Our-Businesses/ ), including shoebuy.com, where a friend of mine works.
340.
by sethg 16y ago
...but you can teach the technique to someone who is not so smart. Or you can use the technique to launder money.
341.
by sethg 16y ago
I admit that I have never been a landlord per se, but I do understand that a Tenant From Hell can exploit the law to screw well-meaning landlords. I also once had a Roommate From Hell who paid a token amount of rent to me rather than to the
342.
by sethg 16y ago
As a former tenant, I have never asked my landlord for all new appliances or asked them to discount my rent just because they feel sorry for me. I have been in situations where I wanted to contact the landlord about legitimate issues, ra
343.
by sethg 16y ago
I think the original op-ed spoke on both a logical and emotional level. On the logical level, as you say, the caveats pretty much cancelled out any substantive arguments. On the emotional level, there was an overwhelming message of you W
344.
by sethg 16y ago
On the one hand, I have a low opinion of the WSJ editorial pages, so I want to believe that the editors crafted the op-ed to portray Chua in a way that reflects their own political and racial biases, rather than the image that Chua wanted
345.
by sethg 16y ago
I’m putting a lot more trust in responses to Chua, from other Asian-Americans talking about their own experiences, than in Chua herself. Once the WSJ op-ed became That Thing On The Internet Everyone Was Talking About, she started walking
346.
by sethg 16y ago
If it had to, couldn’t the party trash the currency (from an international investor’s point of view) without trashing the economy?
347.
by sethg 16y ago
OK, that’s the upside from the depositor’s point of view. What is the upside from the Bank of China’s point of view? Given the massive dollar reserves that the Chinese government has accumulated from its trade surplus, why should they sel
348.
by sethg 16y ago
In my first job as a Real Programmer (rather than as a tech writer looking for excuses to write code), one of my first tasks was adding features to a script that read a particular kind of XML file. The parser, such as it was, was entirely
349.
Why Verizon was smart to pass up the iPhone(slate.com)
1 points by sethg 16y ago|0 comments
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by sethg 16y ago
The kid who merely has 1560 SAT and state violin awards won’t get into Harvard. The people running admissions for top-tier schools are looking for freshmen who are “well-rounded” as well as smart, and they want a “diverse” student body a
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by sethg 16y ago
One of my favorite MeFi comments on the original op-ed: Dear Asian-Americans, Thanks for taking over from us that stereotype of the overachieving, uncreative grind! Feel free to hand it off to someone else next generation. Should be pretty
352.
by sethg 16y ago
What are the essential differences between claiming Chinese mother supremacy from white supremacy? Naked appeals to racism are out of fashion. Attributing differences among ethnic groups to “culture” provides one with plausible deniabili
353.
by sethg 16y ago
Classic joke: “What’s a Jewish dropout? A boy without a Ph.D.”
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by sethg 16y ago
http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/jokes/viola.html
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by sethg 16y ago
You mean, the WSJ chose to highlight that fraction of the book that reinforced a popular stereotype of Asians . Loverly.
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by sethg 16y ago
If you have a class of twenty children, and all twenty have mothers who are pushing them, not just to do well, but to be number one in the class , then nineteen of them have been set up for failure.
357.
by sethg 16y ago
Lithuania ( http://lists.openid.net/pipermail/openid-eu/2009-February/00... ) allegedly has an OpenID-based national digital identity system, but Google Chrome does not trust the SSL certificate on Lithuania’s provider ( https://openid.vrm.
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by sethg 16y ago
When I make digs at Dan Brown’s work, they are anything but gratuitous. I should have thrown The DaVinci Code across the room when the narrator declared that Leonardo had invented public-key cryptography.
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by sethg 16y ago
I would like to see the tax code become a lot more progressive, but I cheerfully admit that the AMT is an awful kludge.
360.
by sethg 16y ago
All the fuss over OMG HIGHER TAXES for people making over $250K/year neglects one important detail: these tax brackets are marginal tax rates, not absolute ones. Even if the rates for people making $250K and up had reverted to Clinton-er

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