comrade_ogilvy

I think a variation of your idea is a winner. The top of the delivery truck can have lots of instrumentation to determine whether the final approach is safe, and help guide the landing. The human does the last 50 feet of delivery.

A computer can know exactly where the trucks are and when they will be in the vicinity. The delivery time can be fairly accurately estimated on the spot.

In an urban environment, bikes could do the last mile, with the robots delivered to pre-designated drop off points. A predetermined location would be easy on the computer.

But I think your idea works better in a suburban zone. The trucks exist and are constantly driving around. It is a question of how to re-prioritize the work on the fly.

The practical answer is probably to blend the technologies. In an urban environment, the bikes do the last mile. Very small drop off points with tiny specialized helipads would accept a stream of fast deliveries from the more distant real warehouses. Since the routes would be established, the computer technology demands would be modest.

Get the package to the drop off point in 30-60 minutes by quad-copter. Get the package from there by bike in 30-60 minutes. There would be uncertainty based on the availability of human messengers, but routes and delivery times can be estimated/calculated by computer. "Estimated delivery in 79 minutes. Click yes?"

Keep in the larger context in mind:

Your former employer (and anyone else you have done significant business with) can always find some flimsy basis for a lawsuit that will cost you several dozens of sleepless nights and $10k-$20k in lawyers fees, before it is thrown out by the judge.

What is stopping the other guy is they are not pissed off enough to throw $50k-$100k in the toilet for the lawyers fees and distraction to punish you unjustly.

Not signing does not actually protect you from baseless suits, if you run your mouth.

I have had this happen a couple time. I got a call one Saturday morning asking about 3 recent charges, including a Men's Warehouse in Waikiki.

My response: "You are calling me at my California home number. I WISH I were in Waikiki right now. How about you reverse everything today and send me a new card in the mail?"

Exactly. When you pre-authorize money to be removed from your account, the bank will happily believe every future charge from that party. From their point of view, your emptied bank account is your problem.

In fact, some banks will not even give you an effective means of removing such authorization. You may literally need a new bank account to keep your account from being emptied in the future.

I am ideologically opposed to ever letting money leaving my bank account, except under my close supervision with direct instructions on time and amount and to whom.

That means nobody has a right to ask for money from my bank. I tell my bank whom to give money and how much. Not my credit card. Not my mortgage company. Definitely not my gym.* Nobody. Never.

Therefore I never used debit cards. Wells Fargo kept sending me debit cards when my ATM card expired. I changed banks. I do not want any ambiguity about the balance in my bank.

"But they promise me all kinds of protections!" That sounds nice, but there are two problems:

First, you are giving up a wonderful kind of protection: the ability to walk away. If I disagree with my credit card company, I can pay what I deem correct and cancel my card. They can see me in court about the remaining balance, if they think they can win. I am whole. I still have my money in the bank account. It is approximately never going to be a problem, because the credit card companies understand the score. They have a strong incentive to play fair with an honest credit card holder.

Second of all, the moment the bank/credit card company thinks something really fishy is going on, you are screwed. You know how you said you were wondering about those security questions and whether you would recognize the voice? Think carefully. If the bank suspects your nephew who stayed the weekend last month or a roommate or an ex-SO are directly involved, it all becomes your problem. The bank will not restore any funds to your account. The local police will laugh at you. And now you see the problem. The fact of your emptied bank account will not be changed, and those promises you were banking on are worthless. (Have money to hire a lawyer? That one is lose-lose.)

* Private gyms love to get bill your bank account and be authorized for automatic payment. The thing most people do not realize is most banks consider this to be completely and totally your problem now. If you cancel your gym membership, and the gym makes a "mistake" and keeps billing you, the bank will not help you. In fact, some banks will tell you that your only recourse (from their POV) is to get a new bank account to protect yourself in the future. Those "mistakes"? Your problem.

That sounds exactly like the kind of wishful thinking the OP is railing against. For "retail" folk who are having trouble navigating through regular life without getting screwed by their regular bank account, what does bitcoin offer? Less than nothing. Bitcoins may have their uses, but it is primarily an advantage to very sophisticated persons (or criminals).

I would argue that fear of failure is taught.

Small children are relentless and courageous and highly tolerant of discomfort -- falling down 20 times does not intimidate them when learning to walk. They get tired, shrug and try again later. They pause their learning process temporarily but there are no negative emotions there, while the thrill of attempting something new is still kindling.

The founders were pushed out because the VCs perceived the founders were not running the company all that well. The VCs may have been wrong in that assessment, but the VC controlled board did go through the hassle of bringing in new management for fun.

Exactly. The preferred stock is paid for with real money. The common shares I bought as an employee was at single digit pennies a share. While I am not exactly happy how I got wiped out, I did less badly than many VCs did.

Yup. Our choices have consequences, and he put a lot of effort into making the world a crappier place so he could have a bit more stuff, most of which he probably did not actually need.

But the author did even realize half of it. A cashier demoted here or docked pay there is only the tip of the iceberg. The bigger cost is how every manager of every corporate store he scammed was put under pressure to look at all employees as insects, for fear that a few bad apples were running a side business doing favors for friends.

It is true that the cost may well be less than sending a check to some American farmers to ship over rice, because the monies circulate locally.

But ultimately that money could have built a big dam, or a few beautiful bridges, or a small power plant in a country with lots of power outages.

I personally think it is money well spent, because it heralds the arrival of India to the world of first class satellite launching, by doing something Russia failed at the first few attempts. But that payoff is over the long term.

Compelling someone to lie after the facts have changed seems to me a far murkier legal area (and perhaps easier to fight in court).

And IIRC C-level executives are required to certify they believe their quarterly reports are, to the best of their knowledge, accurate, under Sarbanes-Oxley. There is a ticking clock here, once Apple asserts that the nebulous statement is relevant to the value of the company, because some customers are tetchy about their data.

Being deceitful about something that a reasonable person could construe as relevant to the value of the corporation in a public document could be a crime. Stockholders have rights.

I think a case can be made that public perceptions about how effectively Apple protects customer data is relevant to the company's perceived value to its customers, and therefore to its stockholders.

There is an interesting question here about whether a judge could order someone to commit a crime. Would he have the balls to put that in writing?

Can the CEO simply refuse to publish his quarterly results because he cannot certify it is accurate and complete under SOX? Sorry, SEC. Go talk to the secret judge.

Could the good Doctor Strangelove be wrong?

Not quite so simple. The nuclear industry wanted/needed federal dollars, so not being in the uranium game looked like a bad bet. Once you have all that infrastructure invested in uranium, investing additional resources into thorium looks less attractive.

The department primarily responsible for the research of nuclear technology including nuclear weapons development is the Department of Energy. Therefore the preferences of the DoD influence DoE decisions.

We should keep in mind that the Age Of Exploration, circa Columbus, was considered monumentally successful by their Eurpoean sponsors, but being a explorer was nearly a death sentence. (I exaggerate only slightly).

"The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation."

Obviously, we need to deincentivize that.

"one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase ... into the dustbin, where it belongs."

Because, while not bosom buddies, the medical professionals and insurance companies are better at working together to influence costs up?

Part of the problem here is a matter of conflating people and government.

"Death to America" =/= "Death to Americans"

The better translation is "Regime change in America" -- they want a "better" (in their eyes) gov't in America, and an end to the obnoxious (in their eyes) American foreign policy. (Obviously, chanting does not automatically grant such. But whatever.)

And that works the other way around. "We support regime change in Tehran" translates into "Death to Iran". Iranians understand this. Americans do not.

When an Iranian official says "We believe that the unjust Israeli gov't will eventually fall, and only be a memory in the history books", they may mean exactly that. "Somehow" that gets translated into "Kill all the Jews" in certain Western media.

Of course, "kill all the Jews" is provably wrong, because there are tens of thousands of Jews still living in Iran. (The number has been declining, but the rump of a once thriving populous still endures.) If the Iranian gov't actually believed killing Jews was a positive thing in the eyes of Allah, they could rack up tens of thousands of bonus points in short order. They do not. Their quarrel is with the existing governments of Israel and America, not with the people in general.

I agree. The best examples of third parties are the modern British Liberal party, and the insurgent Republican Party of 1860. But we can see that there were/are very strong regional factors in play, and that it never found a stable or quasi-stable situation where there were an obviously better menu of candidate choices.

If the case is so clear, then they will be convicted with the full rights as the rest of us, won't they?

Once upon a time, I was waiting in the Illinois state supreme court room for my then SO to be sworn in as a new member of the bar. Behind me, two little old ladies were chatting. "What they did to those babies, they do not deserve a trial." The topic was the (alleged, at the time) Oklahoma City bombing perpetrators.

That is an interesting line of thought, isn't it? Bad people do not deserve good trials. Obviously only good people deserve good trials. Wouldn't it be wonderfully efficient to simply dispense with the trials for all those bad people? In fact, why have trials at all? Good people do not need trials. We just let a cop or judge decide who is good or bad. The good people deserve trials, but since they are good, we can just set them free. The bad people, right to jail for you. Done!

The trial system as a tool of justice rests on the assumption that even very very bad people deserve fair trials so that society can make a sober assessment of whether and to what degree they should be accountable for the particular crimes. Otherwise it is all theater.

If you do not positively believe in open and fair trials for bad people, do not pretend you believe in trials at all.

Yes and no. The idealized invisible hand is built on the axiom that information flows, and the decision makers have feedback to learn from their own mistakes and the mistakes of others. When the axiom happens to be mostly untrue, then problems arise.

Medicine is an area where the individual patient can very often not provide useful feedback to themselves or others. It is too technically hard because anecdotes can easily fool individuals, even expert individuals.

Adam Smith himself was both a moralist and an economist. He had a nuanced understanding of the topic, and recognized the tendencies of the invisible hand to go the very bad places, under some scenarios.

A Wiener might be a person from Wien, Osterreich (which translates to Vienna, Austria in English).

Your points are all good ones.

The likely problem is the potential for increased suffering for future generations, not necessarily to the child to be immediately born.

There are genes that a usually superior when heterogenous. Sickle cell is the classic example. But it is quite possibly true that Tay-Sachs is also heterogeneous superior -- there is circumstantial evidence that it has been positively selected for.

If people feel it is necessary to make the smartest children possible, the grandchildren will risk immense unnecessary suffering, unless they are brought into this world under the loving care of a genetic counselor.

Heterosis just means there are twice as many factors to worry over. If it becomes too faddish to pick the exact same two genetic codings for a particular gene or select away every gene not on a preferred list, we still lose and immense amount of variability within a generation.

The ultimate end is not even to simply pick the contents of the 46 chromosomes. It is medically plausible to purposefully create human chimeras -- basically it when fraternal twins happen to combine to become one fetus. ("We have selected these 46 chromosomes for the neural material, and these other 46 for the skeletal-muscular system. Looks like we have a few fetuses where the combination took to the right locations. We destroyed many eggs, but it is all worth it so your son can be the best, right?")

Yes, I think it will happen. There is a market for this stuff, and, in time, when and why to say N-O will become less and less obvious.

There are problems with genetic selection. But I think the larger problem will be the personal toll of new found ways of negatively assessing ourselves, and pointlessly diagnosing our inevitable sundry personal weaknesses as medical syndromes.

Who has jurisdiction?

There will always be career men/women who have seen a lot of laundry, who might be bitter when passed up for promotion in favor of a political crony, and find that helping along justice makes for sweet revenge.

That is why extremely malicious conspiracies involving more than a dozen or so people are not believable. As the circle of those in the know increases, the likelihood that someone will think they did not get dealt fairly goes up rapidly, and those with gripes will find they are holding the moral equivalent of nuclear weapons against those who wronged them.

Sports/fashion has its peculiarities, but your anecdote is not convincing.

The big reason that Nike is so successful is that they have maintained their status of a premium brand, in a sweet spot a few notches above where the competition is cutthroat and less profitable. In the short term, crap sells and looks good for this year's sales number. In the long term, crap offers competitors too many openings to convince a consumer that Nike is actually overrated/overpriced.

Saying "yes" to crap worked really well for Izod, up until the moment it failed catastrophically.