mizay7

Always intrigued by this idea. But the thing that I never see addressed in these discussions: what's the plan for schooling? just do small local rural schools? do online supplementation? This is the sticking point that keeps me from going far down this path.

so you are arguing that many small insurers, with insurance not bound to employment, would create a healthy price-quality structure in us health care? akin to the german model?

i think that has some merit, but its hard for me to imagine that having the payer, be disconnected from the consumer can really create a stable market without heavy handed regulation.

i dont think insurance can really get you to an efficient market. health care is simply not a good where price and substitution apply as in many other markets. and rather than jumping through hoops to invent such a market lets agree that this an ethical part of social contract and manage it with the best technocratic solutions that our society can offer. E.G. NHS and NICE

I think you are making a more articulate defense of private/market based health care than i usually hear. but i think fundamentally health care has too many forces that make it untenable for a market. there is no real satiation point in care, people are price inelastic, many services cannot be priced before delivery, there is little opportunity to do repeated business for most of the costliest services, comparison between providers is very difficult, most of the choice happens under incredible duress when you are your weakest point. health care is just not a consumer good that responds well to market mechanisms.

Quibi seems like a neat idea but is being run very strangely for what it is: its being run like old media when the point is that it's new media.

-where is the trial option for a new media format?

-where are the samples of series on YouTube?

-where are my targeted ads on YouTube that point me to those samples?

I saw enough stuff about Quibi on websites where I get my TV and movie discussions to be interested, but nothing in places where I make decisions about what web content i consume to even consider dealing with the friction of a new app and a new subscription.

Agreed, and that should be illegal. Having companies pay for data of non-users as part of Yang's proposal doesn't change anything.

Yeh, this seems backwards, the users pay the companies for free products with their data and their attention. That's the business model. Why would Facebook and Google run those servers if they couldn't have profitably targeted ads.

If you want privacy honoring products you want the users to pay money for the service.

You could argue that, but in that case my inclination would be that you are arguing in bad faith or we live in different realities. There was nothing about that speech which suggested a didactic presentation to me. Like i said in the parent, it seems very obvious that at the moment of speaking he was unable to differentiate between disinfecting surfaces and anti-viral therapy. Something that any adult of middling education should be able to do.

I dont think he suggested people inject themselves with disinfectant. That summary is what allows people to say that headlines are blown out of proportion and allows glossing over the real and only slightly more nuanced issue.

The man showcased profound misunderstanding, but he didn't prescribe lysol injections.

The political discussion in this thread is fascinating. There are people advancing intelligent arguments about how the presidents podium remarks were flippant but basically on topic and that he wasn't telling people to actually drink bleach. While true, in my eyes it is obvious that he conflated sterilizing a surface with killing infection in a human and then started riffing on it.

It is incredibly strange and scary to me that not everyone is on the same page here. If you want to be generous you could say that the president was fatigued and had a 'brain fart' conflating the two. But this wasn't an issue with being articulate or not, or off the cuff or not, or how prescriptive he was. The man clearly thought that disinfecting surfaces relates to treating people. I find it terrifying that our leader could make such a mistake, especially at this stage of the pandemic.

we use azure data explorer for a lot of data storage. It is a terribly boring name but it highly performant at a large range of data sizes, stores rectangular (table) data with clear schematization, and uses the piping type of syntax of tidyverse. I love it. I really wish they would rebrand and market it more.

I dont really know how to change the economics of the web without changing the laws around financial transactions. The various anti money laundering laws and anti terrorism laws make it basically impossible to transact money without significant compliance costs. And if the transactions are to be small and decentralized those compliance costs become prohibitive.

Yeh, my research had basically dead ended in MSB regulations as well. I get the money laundering concern but also strongly feel that absence of micro-transactions has destroyed the internet and is now doing terrible things to our brains.

I should look more into ACH, i dont remember why i moved away from that direction.

I considered crypto but it seemed like too much of a bucket of worms at the moment.

I was hoping somewhere in the fintech survey someone was doing something to enable p2p microtransation. But it seems like the quest continues.

Say i have a platform (like a game) and I would like users to be able to exchange tokens of some kind, like kudos. But i would like those tokens to have actual value. So a user might buy 50 tokens for a dollar, gift them to teammates at end of matches for good team work. At the same time the user is collecting tokens for her good teamwork. At the end of the month the user might have given out 40 tokens but received 200. So she can now withdraw 210 tokens from her account for a value of $4.05. Or maybe those initial 50 tokens cant be withdrawn, only the 200 that were earned are redeemable for cash.

Also, is this possible outside of the US? How would this work for US based users?

Does anyone know if anything in the space can allow for P2P microtransactions? Maybe in batches: people send each other a few pennies at time and cash out at the end of the month?

From my review it seemed like this is hard to manage with money laundering regulation but I would love to know if a fintech company can make this work.

Agree in principle. But in practice, what is the alternative business model you propose?

Also, changing the business model away from surveillance capitalism, in my eyes, is not a first step but a massive and complicated (though perhaps very necessary) end goal.

This reads like an amazing work of fiction.

No, its toxic by design.

All the big social networks exist to serve advertisers. They sell users attention to marketers. This means that their profit is directly dependent on how much attention they can harvest. So the systems that emerge (consciously or not) propagate attention grabbing content. This means that trolling and toxicity which exist to get a reaction get systematically supported. It also means that the novel and affirming fake news get magnified. It also means that the lowest common denominator cruelty does best (hey Logan Paul and your 'prankster' cadre).

None of this changes if you want tech and services paid for by your attention and mind-share. If users actually become customers then the question becomes what might they spend money on, not just what can we get them to pay attention to. And that can lead to much more sophisticated behavior. Behavior that actually reflects our conscious choices as opposed to subconscious impulses.

Check out oalrus.com for my proposal to implement something like that.

Yeh, this is one of the reasons network effects are so powerful and so effective market capture. Anybody who wants to push against that is going to have to spend a lot of time and resource getting enough users to create even an echo of a network effect and overcome those individual insecurities that you mention.

Fear of uncertainty makes sense and something I haven't thought about too much in this project. Sad that the modern net has created such a 'gotchya' impression. I would think that this comes from everyone promising free but actually desperately looking for revenue somewhere.

I feel like this is solvable with smart policies and good institutional culture. One thought that I had was that a user commits to depositing say $2 to use for micro payments for the month, but doesn't actually get charged until the end of the month. This delays the pain point of spending money (thereby reducing it) but also may minimize the sensation of risks.

I really like her commentary and glad she is getting more attention.

I think the issue is the magic of free and the irrationality of humans. Free creates irrational responses. People will use a lot of a thing if its free even if its bad rather than dealing with the perceived loss of paying 2 cents for something better.

So as long as no one figures out how to make micro-transactions cognitively easier than free stuff then free tech will prevail. And payment will be harvested via information and attention.

The dystopia we are building is not because we want free stuff, but because we are too lazy to make the choice about spending 2 cents.

I am trying to change that with oalrus.com but we shall see if i mange to build a large enough of a list of alpha users to give the network a chance.

well now the video was released. she was walking from the median. So yes, that seems like a colossal failure of the system.

I think the police are incorrect in saying that the woman walked out the median. If you look at the photo (in the NYT) with the bike and car, its shows (and is captioned as) the car damaged on the right side and the bike is on side walk. It seems most likely that the woman stepped out from behind the trees on the right side of the street.

If people are actually correct about the median thing then I cant imagine how this is not a colossal failure of software. But again it makes way more sense that she walked out from the right side of the road.