ajkessler

Why not? (Honest question.)

We have states that have no personal income tax. Not surprisingly, these states are doing fine because they raise revenue other ways.

Most companies don't have 4000 employees, or need 1000 robots. Like every business, you add capacity as necessary. Diapers.com started with one mom and minivan.

Ripe bananas are yellow, but painting a green banana yellow does not ripen it.

You're making a huge assumption here that the way someone's mind works is fixed and unalterable. I don't believe this. I think, and have some personal experience here, that you can change the way you think about things, the way you approach things, etc. And you can certainly develop the way successful people look at the world.

I actually think the banana metaphor is excellent: a certain technique may not work for person A, who thinks about the world in A way. But, that person can work to change their mind, to ripen, and eventually see the world close to the way that person B does.

Uh, this is actually a pretty good idea, if you could implement it. It would have to filter out background noise, and would be tough to make it work in a crowd, but it seems like a decent aid, at least for those who are lucid enough to understand that they have a disorder.

As SoftwareMaven explains below, many schizophrenics experience visual hallucinations in addition to aural hallucinations, but this doesn't seem like a huge stumbling block.

Bigger, I think, is the paranoia aspect. If you really, truly believe the plants in and outside your house are vampires who are waiting to kill you (true story, unfortunately) I can't imagine you're going to put too much faith into your wristband.

>>No one really wants to help you unless there is something in it for them or it fits into their larger plan.<<

Some good points, but I've found this one to be wildly untrue. Almost universally, I've found really successful people want to help other people become really successful. Like his other points, you'll have to initiate and ask for their help, but I've never met anyone successful who isn't willing to give to just about anyone.

This seems like the most important question... Since the paper is paywalled, and science reporting is terrible, can someone with access inform us just what the hell the fungus turns the plastic into?

Which manufacturers rely on point and shoots to stay afloat?

You're point is valid, though not exactly contrarian. The decline of point and shoots became pretty obvious when the iphone 3g was released. I'm sure this is why every manufacturer has been diversifying their lineups away from point and shoots over the last 5 years. Sony released a full SLR lineup, including lenses. Olympus has been producing very high quality mirrorless bodies (not exactly point and shoots) for a few years now. Even Fujifilm has followed suit. Nikon and Canon, who probably generate a lot of revenue from p&s sales, have been widely diversified for decades.

Revenue is (estimated at) already over $4b a year:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-20/facebook-revenue-wi...

Right, but if the suburbs weren't so sparse... they wouldn't be suburbs. The empty space is precisely the reason many people choose to live there.

Sure. But since income disparity has soared in the last 40 years and crime rates have plummeted, even if they have plummeted everywhere, this indicates that inequality, if it has any effect at all, is likely pretty minor.

I think this would be near impossible to test for though. So many factors affect crime rates across difference societies, and different societies experience wildly different types of income disparity. Intuitively, I imagine places with smaller net income disparity but larger real income disparity (ie a city where everyone is relatively poor but some are destitute) have much more crime than places with larger net income disparity but smaller real income disparity (ie a city where everyone is relatively wealthy, but a few are unbelievably rich).

How do you explain some of the highest income disparity in the last century with the lowest crime rates, well, pretty much ever?

Most dividends are taxed at the appropriate long-term capital gains rate, for now:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_dividend

In theory, you're right: courts don't make laws. In practice, courts make law every day. This is intuitively obvious (e.g. If law says you can't do A or C but says nothing about B, and the court says "B is really just like A and C, so B is also prohibited under the law", the court has just made law)[edit: perhaps not so obvious if you don't practice law, but courts do this every day], but also goes deeper: The very idea of judicial review itself was invented by the courts (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison).

One of the most famous is US v. Carolene (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Carolene_Produ...), but there are hundreds, maybe thousands of examples. Even when they don't contain actual law, footnotes often give insights into why a court decided an issue or interpreted a fact the way it did. These little hints can be invaluable in distinguishing later cases, or giving a later court a foothold to create some new law.

Some of our most important caselaw is contained in footnotes.

1. I didn't check your numbers, but I'll assume you're correct. However, in my experience, film does not even come close to approaching those theoretical lp/mm numbers. This test, done with Ektachrome instead of Ektar, reflects my own findings: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/cameras/iq180_vs_8...

2. Ok, you're right. Some films will certainly outperform some digital. But, the new MF backs will shoot 13-15 stops as well, so who wins? I'd argue that, on average, digital trumps film. I've shot mostly velvia (the most popular landscape/wildlife film for 30 years?) and provia, and those can't compete with even my 3 year old dslr. (see http://www.clarkvision.com/articles/dynamicrange2/ for tests done with an 8 year old dslr)

3. Get a color checker (http://xritephoto.com/ph_product_overview.aspx?ID=1192). No filters necessary, and precise color no matter what lighting conditions. And, you'd be able to eliminate one of those miserable fucking peripherals.

FWIW, going digital has tremendously simplified my workflow and allowed me more shooting time with less dicking around with equipment time, and much better quality prints (and I make really big prints). Cheers.

He's talking about anti-aliasing filters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-aliasing_filter), which essentially blur the image enough to mask moire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moire).

Because this is the internet, I feel obliged to point out the inaccuracies of some of his other statements:

>>Film was and is to some degree still capable of more resolution, more dynamic range, better color fidelity and less prone to weird errors in the way that a Bayer sensor does<<

First of all, film and digital sensors of comparable sizes have nowhere near the same amount of resolution, dynamic range, or color fidelity. Digital sensors simply murder film in every category. (You can make the argument that B&W film still has some an edge in terms of dynamic range, but considering you're matching it against RGB sensors, I'm not sure that's fair.) Even 8x10 film is now out-resolved by medium format backs.

In terms of color fidelity, there is no film emulsion that will get you more accurate results than properly color-managed digital equipment. Which is exactly why museums and people who care about accurate color reproduction use digital capture.

Finally, the anti-aliasing filters aren't exactly a big deal. Yes, they degrade image quality. Yet, even with them on most consumer sensors, those sensors still massively out-resolve, and produce sharper images, than comparable film. Also note that most medium format backs don't have AA filters.

So, while somebody might like using film (or may need to in certain circumstances) the arguments presented aren't exactly the best justifications for doing so.

While he seems well meaning, his point is a bit silly and shows a lack of understanding as to how capitalism works.

>>Instead of measuring ourselves by the size of our Series A or our average profit per employee, let’s measure in lives changed.<<

In an article that talks about the power of software to scale and effect entire populations of people, just how does he propose to "measure lives changed"? He doesn't, really. And how could he?

For example, if you rescue me from a burning building, you've certainly changed my life. But by how much? Do you now get credit for every accomplishment (or bad act) I do from that day forward? Or, if you're polite and let me get the cab we both hail, which allows me to get to my meeting on time, which allows me to close the sale and get the promotion... you've actually changed my life quite a bit, and you'll almost certainly never know about it.

The problem is, many more lives are changed by actions that are seemingly trivial, and often even unseen, than by those that are visibly heroic. Measurement then becomes impossible. Except we've figured out how to measure it. We use money.

If you're getting paid a princely some to design some system that end users will never see, you can be sure it's because the middleman thinks its valuable. He thinks he will be able to change people's lives. And, his belief will be confirmed when the end users pay him. In exchange for money, the end users get something that makes them better off. And that's the entire basis of capitalism.

So, while it's sexy to say that we have a responsibility to better the world at large because of our privilege, don't overlook the fact that by performing some service for pay, you are already bettering the world at large. By definition.

Significantly higher relative to life expectancy of someone who makes it to 10 years old, but still incredibly low in the Western world. It's likely close enough to 0 that it just isn't visible on the graph.

But, how long you live might affect how many children you have.

Think of it this way: if you knew you had a high probability of living to 80, you might decide to have fewer offspring so that you could dedicate your earnings to supporting yourself in your later years (children are very expensive after all).

Regardless of whether this hypothesis is true, clearly the number of years you live likely has some bearing on how many children you might choose to have.

I don't think a finer thing could be said about a man.

http://www.ajkesslerblog.com/a-hell-of-a-eulogy/

He has a habit of deleting almost all of the posts on his tumblr. When he started the account, he actually said he was only going to have one or two posts up at any one time. It's kind of surprising the number he's got up now (although they're almost all photos). The Jobs tribute post could have been deleted out of spite, but he's deleted some other really cool stuff too, so I kinda doubt it.

Providing value is nothing more than fulfilling someone else's desire, whether that desire is for a shiny new car that accelerates very quickly, or a new way to communicate, or something pretty to look at, or something delicious to eat, or etc., etc.

Luckily, human beings have essentially unlimited desires. For this reason, there will always be sufficiently valuable things for people to do.

If there is truly nothing valuable for an entire population to do, ie if machines can fulfill every desire we can dream up, it means humanity has finally created utopia.

Historically, those industries required less talented people in order to stay in business. Somebody has to sell the product, answer the phones, sweep the floors, etc. If you created a company that could operate with out all of those less talented people, this would be a boon.

Even if you presume all those less talented employees are mindless drones, if you can provide the same service with fewer employees, you now have all the value created by that service, plus you have all those extra mindless drones to go produce value someplace else.

As to your second point, I can't imagine that's what he's really thinking. The few talented people who create the twitters, iphones, etcs, are far outnumbered by the millions of less-talented people who actually use those products.

“Five hundred people will have job security for the next decade, but how much value does it create for the entire economy ? It may not be enough to dramatically improve living standards in the U.S. over the next decade or two decades.”

It's strange that someone as successful as Peter Thiel has been in the startup world, a world built on providing value, would make such a statement. What does the number of permanent or semi-permanent jobs have to do with the amount of value being created by something like twitter? If it took 100,000 employees to run twitter as it exists today, would that make it more valuable to the economy? Of course not.

If it only took one guy to design, build, ship, and sell the iPhone, Apple would be far more valuable to the economy, not less. You'd free up all those talented people to go out and create even more value on their own.

Also, he seems to equate increased $$ with increased living standards. By and large that's been historically true, but it's a bit misleading. Even if twitter made 0 money and created 0 jobs, it would still improve living standards. Certainly not in the way indoor plumbing or electricity raised living standards, but it still makes people's lives easier, which, by definition, improves living standards.

RE your first point, you're sort of correct. Courts can award treble damages for willful and wanton infringement of a patent. Courts don't award treble damages willy nilly; they seem to award them when you intentionally rip off somebody's patent. Even if you know of another's patent rights, if you have a good faith claim as to why/how your patent doesn't infringe, and if you have a solid opinion letter from counsel, you generally won't get hit with increased damages, even if you lose the underlying suit.

RE software, I'd tend to agree with you. The original post makes the case that all patents are bad though, and that they specifically prevent that transmittal of knowledge. That's really what I was responding to.

There is so much wrong here that I appreciate you numbering them.

-1. Yes, people read patents all the time. For one example many might be familiar with here, see any of the Mac or Canon or Nikon rumors sites, which comb through filings to learn what their favorite companies are up to. Second, the benefit comes not just from reading the actual patents. Since the info is already out there and protected, there's no real harm for those who developed the innovation in discussing it openly in journals/conferences/trade shows/popular magazines/newspapers/etc. We see this all the time, probably much more than if patents didn't exist.

1. Patents are generally written in pretty simple language. When they're hard to read, it's because the language used is technical, not legal.

2. This is just factually wrong. If you don't describe something, it's very difficult to try to prevent or collect from someone using the idea you haven't described.

3. Sure, for a limited time. This doesn't mean there aren't periphery benefits from seeing how someone did something novel. In the medical field, advances that utilize some novel technique often provoke other people to look at similar though unrelated techniques.

4. This is just factually and legal incorrect.

Exactly, which means if Coke had patented the formula, society would be better off.

While patents may provide a "stumbling block to innovation and progress", it's wrong to say they inhibit "the free exchange of ideas, and restrict[] our knowledge of how things work." Patents do just the opposite: to obtain one, you must describe in detail how a process works. This means that when you're granted a patent, you disclose to the whole world how your novel invention or process works. (The argument that the USPTO is granting frivolous patents on non-novel things is a separate argument.)

The alternative (though not really applicable to software or mechanical processes that get shipped in a product) is to keep everything secret. Had Coca Cola patented their formula, everyone would have known how to make the drink 20 years later.

...which is why I linked to some actual science. The fact that anecdote seems to coincide with the science, while perhaps statistically irrelevant, I thought others might find interesting.