This number is revenue, but don't forget about cost. Cab drivers only started incurring credit card fees when the city made them start taking cards. I tip more when I use my card than when I pay by cash to help the driver offset the few-dollar fees. It's not a very high-margin business.
There shouldn't be any "few-dollar fees". If they are paying more than 3% (i.e., much less than the change in tips) for the card transaction, then they are being robbed blind by the bank and/or corrupt officials.
Authentically off-duty cab drivers will do exactly what you say. They ask you where you are going and don't unlock unless they like your answer. I'm not saying that abuse never happens, but this scenario is perfectly valid for cab drivers on their way home.
The way hospital balance sheets work these days, they charge you that much to subsidize the many patients who (a) could not afford health insurance, (b) are unemployed, underemployed, or employed without health insurance benefits, (c) avoided preventative health care and healthy lifestyle choices like most Americans, (d) went to the ER as their primary care provider, long after they should have first visited a doctor about preliminary symptoms but could not afford to go, (e) could not legally be turned away by the ER, and (f) had absolutely no way to pay for their care even if they wanted to. The fact that your insurer had to pay almost $13,000 is the point of the individual mandate in health care reform. Otherwise, the only way to keep ERs from closing (and many ARE closing) is getting people like you and your insurer to subsidize the people that use no insurance, get no preventative care, do not manage symptoms and walk into the ER as disasters.
You're too young to remember how at the height of the late 90s "dot com" tech bubble, people were not only dropping out of college to join and start companies, some were even dropping out of high school. Then the tide went out and we coined a new term for the masses of the unemployed and non-degreed: "dot bombers." The conventional wisdom at that point was, "they should have taken the long view." Now we can add your question as a new data point in comparing the current situation to the 90s bubble.
Ideas are cheap, and the future is long. Your idea will still exist in a year or two and there's plenty that can be done part-time until then. You may decide in the future to change careers, to have a kid, to go to grad school. Having a college degree will be an important foundation for wherever you decide to go. It will be much harder to come back and finish later.
Gates and Zuckerberg dropped out because success had already arrived. Just as a smart investor waits for a proof of concept before investing serious money, you should do the same with your personal capital.
One more note: College may be the last time you'll be able to pursue off-the-beaten path interests and understand more about yourself. Take an extra course in calligraphy, or advanced operating system design, or mythology, or history-- whatever passions or passing interests you have never had a chance to nurture. In addition to shoring up your tech background, you'll become a more well-rounded person, which (besides the intrinsic benefits) is something companies like to see when they hire. Give serendipity a chance to happen in the great mixing bowl and incubator that college is.
Yes, the skin rendering was very nice, and the lighting was great. Which brought into sharp relief how little progress has been made on procedural character animation. When the welder-guy walked across the roof and stopped on the edge, you could see a painfully clear walking loop and outro animation back to the standing position -- very familiar from the earlier Unreal engines (except for the residual swinging of the arms). It is jarring to see such mechanical movements in a demo where the quality of the graphics is so realistic. Epic should use Euphoria or some other engine for procedural body movements. The act of walking to the ledge of a roof to inspect a fight below shouldn't look like any other kind of walk.
Agreed. There's a distinct lack of R&D in what is IMHO more important than graphical fidelity - conveying emotion and motion in games. Valve made waves with its (honestly somewhat primitive) facial animation system, and not much has been done with it until now (LA Noire has done something really cool with it and is coming out soonish). It's amazing how much effort we'd spend crafting the perfect artillery shell explosion but your CO yelling orders at you moves like a mannequin.
We've made a lot of gameplay progress into action-RPGs (Mass Effect and the like), and I for one would like to play a game where facial expressions and body language actually mean something (e.g., the character is lying, but instead of smacking you over the head with it, the game can be subtle about it).
We shouldn't wait until after a piece of infrastructure collapses to fix the cracks in the foundation. The public capital stock has been allowed to age much more than the residential and private stock:
Measuring age is not necessarily relevant - if a bridge has a lifetime of 50 years, but the average age is 23 years (up from 16), we have a long way to go before it becomes a problem. Your chart is interesting, but hardly conclusive.
Preferential attachment. It began as a random fluctuation and then entered a positive feedback loop (as it climbed, more HN readers saw it and upvoted it further).
Your comment makes me nostalgic for the times when much of anything was traded based on an objective assessment of its underlying value. Despite the crash of 08 and subsequent deleveraging, we are still several generations removed from trading on fundamentals. Trading today is more about AI trader bots battling each other for a fraction of a cent of spread in the millisecond timescale than making a rational projection about the future profit potential of the company at the year or decade timescale. Like most other derivatives, this is a side bet, and Wall Street loves offering side bets on anything. You can even buy weather derivatives to hedge against rainy days, if that matters to you.
I hate to defend the Street because most people in the industry are self-righteous duches. But then again so are most people who think that their latest RoR Web2.0 project are going to change the world, just poorer duches.
Just facts,
1) Creating a derivative market on Facebook employee options creates value for the Facebook employees because it means that they can now sell their options in a more liquid and better-priced market for cash (to potentially finance their kids education, help buy for a house or for hookers).
2) High frequency/automated trading tightens the bid-ask spread of stocks and does away with the "old boys" network of market-makers; making the purchase of stocks for both mutual funds/retail investors cheaper by $0.02/share-$0.05/share; at a volume of 4+ billion shares daily average volume. These cents add up to savings for market participants. But these machines could also turn around and manipulate the market and help save for hookers for traders/programmers who run them.
3) Weather derivatives, like other derivatives do have intrinsic values. For hedgers (such as hotels/ski slopes/airline industry/agriculture harvest that could be severely affected by inclement weather), they are insurance policies against risk that they are not willing to bear and help ensure that these businesses stay in business. However, if you have an army of Physics PhD who could model the risk/probability in weather derivatives; you could sell these insurance policies and make money to get hookers.
That's the surprising thing I took away from reading quite a lot about the financial crisis - most of the trading makes perfect sense, and seems quite reasonable, when looked at in isolation.
In "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense" there is a description of trading in distressed corporate bonds - I always wondered how you actually make money in bond markets and this was an interesting (to me) example of a scenario where what they were doing was obviously profitable and useful.
