For many pricing problems, auctions are the answer. Doing a roadshow and tickling investor's interest is a separate problem, but many startups already have a size where they are well-known to a big enough share of investors.
There’s a lot of auction theory that comes into play that an individual investor is unlikely to know and I would imagine a startup may not fully comprehend either. I would worry that this is still not a level playing field.
This will force investment banks to have an underwriting fee no greater than the expected loss due to the company not understanding "auction theory." Also, any investor that doesn't think they understand auctions can simply wait a day and receive the exact same opportunity that an investment bank would give.
- man is to woman as doctor is to reprovingly (nurse is the first noun, on position 4)
- woman is to man as doctor is to snodgrass (after a couple nonsense/rare words)
The most important thing that teaches us is that big corpora (bigger than PG) are essential for this method.
>Why should we sympathize with a minority of rent-seekers?
I don't really think this is about sympathizing with rent-seekers.
Cities invest in infrastructure to cover anticipated service delivery well before it's due, and the financing for doing so is a multi-decade affair. Before you complain, this includes things like providing running water, roads that are paved, etc. Really core essential pieces of making a city work.
If your tax base moves to suburbs or just plain leaves the city, the city is still on the hook for those payments, so it results in dramatically cut services or increased taxes on residents.
The flight of some of the tax base incentivizes the flight of many, resulting in further cuts to maintenance contracts, preventative work, and the general crumbling of infrastructure. Sometimes this can be gracefully managed by planned downsizing and renegotiating deals with vendors and financiers. In other cases, this doesn't occur and the city simply... dies. While the US is very young and doesn't have many large examples of this, Flint and Detroit come to mind.
Kinda. The decay of communities is one thing, but the death spiral associated with municipal infrastructure projects and tax bases is another. A small town might invest in a bioreactor to reclaim solids for resale from their wastewater service at a cost of 5 million dollars, but that'll pale in comparison with the construction of multiple new subway extensions at a price in the billions.
Sure, but their current industrial era infrastructure isn’t thousand of years old. Most of it is no older than the infrastructure in the US. Compare the size of London now with 200 years ago.
The article was ambiguous about what the $34B was a measure of (income of the departing residents or the tax income generated by the income of the departing residents).
But the underlying paper makes it clear that it's the former. So it's not accurate to say "US citizens saved $34B...". That was their aggregate income, which is still subject to the same federal taxes no matter where in the US they moved. They would have saved on state and local taxes, depending on the rates of their new home jurisdictions.
The average New Yorker has a mere one-third of the carbon emissions as the average American. This is really bad for the climate overall. Dense city living is very efficient; living in the suburbs and driving everywhere is not. NYC is the densest city we have.
And yet you add up lots of small numbers and they end up turning into a big number that destroys the planet, so the small numbers do matter too. It's the total annual carbon emission that determines the fate of our planet, and this kind of pattern of people switching to higher-carbon lifestyles is bad, especially since the pattern isn't exclusively happening to NYC but broadly to lots of cities. Add up all the cities it's happening to and it absolutely does impact the carbon emissions of the planet.
We don't have to sympathize with rent-seekers necessarily, but I would wonder if the rest of the city can move as adaptively to wherever opportunity beckons, and whether NY can downscale their city services accordingly.
There's a difference between selling flowers in a shop and randomly going around and pointing your gun at people holding flowers and asking them to pay up. The alternative to buying flowers is just spending your money on other things, which is different to the alternatives you have in an armed robbery.
Patent law gives patent owners a monopoly (i.e. the gun) over how an invention is used, but just like there's a difference between self-defense with a gun and using it for armed robbery, there should be - and increasingly is - regulation that forces patent owners to act as market participants offering something valuable rather than street thugs going for protection money.
It's fine to dislike patents, just as it's fine to dislike anti-competitive or outright dishonest practices around patents. Either alone or both in combination are reasonable standpoints.
> and they built it all on the back of open source.
That is exactly the point of permissive open source licenses. Freelancers and commercial companies can build stuff on top of it that makes them money and brings real benefits to paying users.
Windows, MacOS, and iOS/Android would all be stinking piles of hot garbage if it weren't for open source, but then again Linux or the *BSD operating systems wouldn't be where they are today without contributions from companies acting to make a profit.
> Windows, MacOS, and iOS/Android would all be stinking piles of hot garbage if it weren't for open source, but then again Linux or the *BSD operating systems wouldn't be where they are today without contributions from companies acting to make a profit.
The open source part doesn't change anything. Windows has so many hooks that 1984 (the book, not the year) is now a reality in 2020 with DLP software watching employees. Apple's walled garden is not there to encourage growth inside the walls but to extract profit from those that flourish inside of it. And linux is so fragmented because everyone has a great new idea which requires a new X where X is a UI, library, window manager, etc.
Interesting that back in 1980's the Apple II line was frankly pretty darn well open. Sure Apple had copyrights on the assembly, but if you looked at the magazines at the time there were lots of articles giving annotated disassembly of Apple's object code. And yet, Apple sold a bunch of computers anyway. Wow. Fucking genius.
Sure Apple is fighting the Good Fight with privacy (and I've yet to see that it's anything different than pure marketing). But I ask why should Apple need to market "privacy first" when they can just open up their software and show us directly? Let's start by open sourcing any telemetry they send back to the mothership. Is that reasonable perhaps?
Free software licenses permit this, too: you can build stuff on top of it that makes you money and brings real benefits to paying users. You just can't restrict their ability to do exactly what you did.
The Linux and *BSD communities wouldn't be where they are today without those contributions, no. But they would be somewhere else. Not as far down the road, but down a different road; who's to say that would've been worse?
I don't know why you list the only major internally developed OS as if it is the same as the ones that were transformed from open source offerings.
Sure DOS was akin to open source and formed the basis of Windows way back when but the decades of development have left little left (except what exists to support backwards compatability)
In late 90s/early 2000s the mainstream thought around numerical optimization was that it was easy-ish when it was a linear problem, and if you had to rely on nonlinear optimization you were basically lost. People did EM (an earlier subgenre of what is now called Bayesian learning) but knew that it was sensitive to initialization and that they probably didn't hit a good enough maximum. Late 90s neural networks were basically a parlor trick - you could make it do little tricks but almost everything we have now including lots of compute, good initialization, regularization techniques, and pretraining, was absent in the late 90s.
Then in the mid and later 2000s the mainstream method was convex optimization and you had a proof that there was one global optimum and a wide range of optimization methods were guaranteed to reach it from most initialization points. Simultaneously, the theory underlying SVMs and CRFs was developed - that you could actually do a large variety of things and still use these easy, dependable optimization techniques. And people hammered home the need for regularization techniques.
In the late 2000s to early 2010s, several things again came together - one being the discovery of DropOut as a regularization technique - and the understanding that it was one, the other being the development of good initializers that made it possible to use deeper networks. Add to that improved compute power - including the development of CUDA which started out as a way to speed up texture computation but then led to general purpose GPU computing as we know it today.
All this enabled a rediscovery of NN learning which could take off where linear learning methods (SVMs, CRFs) had plateaued before. And often you had a DNN that did what the linear classifier before did but could learn features in addition to that - and could be seen as finding a solution that was strictly better.
But the lack of global optimum means that - even with good initializers and regularization packaged into the NN modules we use in modern DNN software implementations - the whole thing is way more finicky than CRFs ever were. (It would be wrong to say that CRFs are trivial to implement or never finicky at all, just as many well-understood NN architectures have a good out-of-the-box experience with TF/PyTorch etc. - so take this as a general statement that may not hold for all cases).
What pain points would it have saved to write the scientific paper in org-mode? Usually there's a dozen dirty little corners where you want fine-grained control and the org-mode-to-latex converter isn't giving you that by default.
I once wrote a short report that I (probably) could also have written in (any equivalent of) Word or LyX/TeXmacs, or some random WISYWIG editor. Very little finetuning of the layout required or necessary, people still liked it better than plaintext (it had some headlines and tables and stuff, but nothing too fancy). So, nice output yes but be careful if what you need is actual LaTeX document preparation.
>What pain points would it have saved to write the scientific paper in org-mode?
For me, latex is the pain point. I don't want to have to read through pages of inscrutable error messages about overfull mboxes and then read dozens of contradictory stack overflow answers for outdated versions that only half-address the problem I'm having.
porn already works within a well-defined legal framework. There are model releases, people getting paid etc. So if a reputable porn company interacts with their models and their consumers, everything is well. However, there are still non-legal reasons that make it a special case - see the ancestor post about a bank wanting to dictate what a merchant can offer to their credit card customers, or the post about models being treated badly (not getting paid or having to do things that they didn't sign up for). In that case, there still seems to be a difference to non-porn modeling and acting in terms of standards and of recourse available. part of this is that there are more people paying for badly made porn than for badly made action movies
> selfishly lowball the cost of whatever it is they want.
if you asked a recording industry person in the CD age if 10$/month flatrate for music (as offered by Spotify, Google, Amazon, Apple) was a fair deal, they'd have said the same or worse.
The point is, there's enough people willing to pay something but now paying exactly 0$ and not willing to pay north of 200$/year. And we're still stuck at the "newspaper bundle" stage where publications that used to bundle articles into a mass-produced paper copy and distributing them want to use that same one-size-fits-all bundle for how they charge users, even if those same users would only ever read articles by one author on one topic.
Bug bounties work well for publically accessible systems, e.g. a site's web service. As a result, many of the more visible break-ins occur through phishing or spear-phishing and combine social engineering with malware as well as classical intrusion techniques from within the network perimeter.
For many pricing problems, auctions are the answer. Doing a roadshow and tickling investor's interest is a separate problem, but many startups already have a size where they are well-known to a big enough share of investors.