metricman

This reminds me of Juliet Schor's work (an economist). She talks about retreating away from urban areas some, like, in some revolution type way, but I think that is going a bit far.

Here's a video about her ideas and book:

http://vimeo.com/12034640 http://www.amazon.com/Plenitude-New-Economics-True-Wealth/dp...

One idea is: technology has resulted in efficiency increases. These increases have resulted into more compensation for those with capital to deploy technology, but the floor worker (though more efficient) has similar compensation.

So, the efficiency gains of technology, today, are routed toward (going back to the original link) maintaining the status quo. Instead we can 'redefine work' and spend less time working for the owners, and instead contributing to our local communities, etc.

I think the ideas are nice, but trust me: no office full of full-time people wants to hire you for 2 days a week. Part-time is generally unacceptable. I speak from experience - try replying to a recruiter as much.

Techy people can a lot of money, let's say 130k for mid-career at BigCorp in BigCity. Try to scale that down; can you work half-time and pull in 65k? Nope.

These are similar to the ideas of Buckminster Fuller too, about technology and society. I think it's very interesting but very difficult.

This might sound like a joke, or gross, but I think stool measurement is probably a great way to track diet.

And I bet there are apps to help.

Sigh. I searched.

"PoopLog" - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kefsco.poo...

Yes, they were.

"From 1850-1871, the railroads received more than 175 million acres (71 million ha) of public land - an area more than one tenth of the whole United States and larger in area than Texas."

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

Come on, human nature? Designed to keep striving? I've heard this referenced as "keeping up with the Joneses" when it's about matching consumption to your neighbors'.

I never thought "keeping up with the Joneses" is part of my human nature. Or even my culture.

The 'societal overlords' from previous posts you have now ascribed to human nature (??) are really 'society', perhaps influenced by some ultra-elite cadre, sure.

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

I hear this often if I try to discuss Amazon.com work conditions, but I don't like the excuse. Costco is the largest company that comes to mind which makes much stronger claims and (if you believe them) treats employees, even 'unskilled' employees, better.

Here are some Glassdoor reviews for Costco Wholesale:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Costco-Wholesale-Reviews-E2...

I'm sure this isn't a good comparison. But Costco is doing fine and has a large market cap (52B).

This isn't new to Amazon.com, but Amazon.com is exemplary in treating employees in high-demand (i.e. easily replaceable) positions poorly. We should talk about their warehouses because their policies alone could nudge the industry to being more compassionate.

Bezos repeats that "long-term" "willing to be misunderstood" stuff a lot, but how many companies have tried really treating replaceable workers well? Maybe the current conditions inhibit workers from fulfilling their potential and making larger impacts than carrying boxes.

The designer chose a helluva markup there, or the piece is really very thick.

Shapeways prices by volume, cubic centimeter, and if you put your design up for others you can charge a markup.

There's a Pebble bike mount for $12, and I'd expect this to have similar volume, so the markup to $39...?

You could just call yourself a programmer and be done with it. If you wrote a program, I mean, isn't that... lots of people do it without much formal training.

It looks like a good basic app. The layout/design stuff seems well-intentioned but not tuned or styled. The functionality seems to include some pretty general things, like uploading files, and displaying some database query (or whatever).

So, good work. On the other hand, I'm not sure I want to do the NSAs job for them by uploading my chats. I already pay my taxes...

Could the kind intelligence that decodes this post a play-by-play for us regular folk? Is the first step trying to trace the logic mentally? Building some kind of graph-based representation of the code and its calling behavior...? When I read var77, var78, var79... well, yea.

This statistic doesn't seem immediately relevant. Success of marriage (let's say in years before divorce) is heavily influenced by the background of the individual.

Think about getting sent back to the beginning of your marriage, would you be better (with that one)? You would... that's the point.

I'm also not really sure about this article. I find the evidence in that graph not to be compelling enough for summarizing with "bottom line:" and some real clean explanation.

I find the trending cumulative percentage a little confusing to think about.

I also wondered, does this mean there is some income bracket losing people? That is, no more families making 25-75k but still as many making <25k, so the <25k have fewer slightly-above peers?

Then I wondered if maybe this means something about the <25k potentially having less income? That percentage stays flat, but those other earners are changing classification to rich... I don't really know.

After writing this up I realize that what I'd like to see is the whole income distribution. This cherry-picks certain points on the CDF and plots them over time (the income cutoffs of 25k and 75k).

What's interesting to me is whether or not we've gone from a unimodal income distribution to a bimodal one, in the sense that there's a trough between the lowest income families and the highest. If we have a 'middle class' we avoid that, and probably that is socially important.

I think this graph is better for understanding the main article, which plots the Gini coefficient for income distribution over time by country [a few, anyway]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gini_since_WWII.svg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient