Building in an interrupt "Hey, pay attention to the real world now" feature would seem important. On the other hand, it'd still be awkward when you had to climb over someone to go to the toilet or something.
I'd be interested to try inflight VR. It could be really good, or it could just be a one-way ticket to airsickness.
What I'd really love would be a feature that lets me see the scenery currently around me, as if I were flying in the air without the plane. You could just use Google Maps data at first, but if someday they installed a few cameras on the exterior...
Even out there, it's a pretty rare use case. If you're somewhere so remote that you can't get there with any kind of land vehicle, then... what are you even doing there, that you need a semi-permanent solid structure?
There's no good solution to running a large organisation. Instead of complaining that large organisations are badly run, we should instead marvel that they run at all.
Unfortunately the indispensible employee generally isn't the one getting fed hard technical problems, he's the one responsible for maintaining the complex, mission-critical thingy that only he understands and which seems to break down on a regular basis.
Given the ongoing mess that was the onlineification of the 2016 census, I don't think anyone (the people or the government) would have any interest in this.
The Australian election system is pretty damn good, and very trustworthy, because it works with pencils, papers, and lots of eyes on the ballots and the counters.
>Many people come to realize their mediocrity after spending enough time under the sun. Accepting this realization and learning to be happy with it takes time -- especially at the beginning.
I don't know, I think it only bothers those of us who were brought up being told "oh, you're so special". Those who were never told that in the first place never expected to be special, so it doesn't bother them when they grow up to find that they're not.
>I think you're mistaking someone who's happy but ignorant of their mediocrity, and someone who's aware of their own mediocrity
Not really, I don't think people are unaware of their mediocrity, it's just that it doesn't bother them.
For instance I'm not unaware that I am mediocre at the 100m sprint, it's just that it has never occurred to me to be in the least bit bothered by this fact. There's plenty of people out there who are mediocre at sprinting as well as everything else, and are not bothered by their mediocrity along any of these axes.
The vast majority of people on the planet are mediocre, and many people seem happy about it; or rather, if they're unhappy then they're unhappy about other things rather than their own mediocrity.
But then you've got the interviewee for this article, who is probably not happy with her own mediocrity. You can tell this by how hard she insists that she is. People who are genuinely happy with their mediocrity don't go around blogging about it -- in fact, they don't think about it.
Restricted to the publically-available data from one particular and rather odd site, but probably not crazy.
At first it seems counterintuitive, shouldn't it be roughly 50% gaining and 50% losing? But I guess that people typically put in a modest amount of play money, and then tend to trade until either they run out or get discouraged from losses.
Which still has nothing to do with value, which is why I value more highly a Stradivarius violin than the pile of ashes which you could obtain by burning a Stradivarius violin.
> Even crazier, the physical size of your font can influence peoples’ understanding and feelings about it.
Now, I wonder if I can make this work the other way around. If I'm making an offer on something, I wonder if it's more likely to be accepted if I write it in giant numerals.
I don't think the many-syllables thing is likely to work, though, if I offer some crazy non-round number then my bargaining partner is likely to just come straight back with "How about we round it up to...?" -- though I suppose that could be useful if even the rounded-up number is a nice low one.
I don't know if game theory is the branch of mathematics that can help you out here. Game theory usually rests on matters of "If I do X then my opponent(s) will do Y", but in this situation you don't even know how many opponents you might have.
Your best shot would probably to be just to sit there and collect a shitload of statistics about under exactly what circumstances you're most likely to be the final bidder, and then only bid under those circumstances... and then hope nobody else has been collecting the same statistics and coming to exactly the same conclusion.
I suppose because you pay a small amount of money and you may or may not get something valuable out, which makes it effectively gambling from the bidder's point of view.
> but I don't see where this is a game of chance instead of a consequence of who is participating
From the point of view of an individual bidder, "who else is participating" is a matter of chance.
I'd be interested to try inflight VR. It could be really good, or it could just be a one-way ticket to airsickness.
What I'd really love would be a feature that lets me see the scenery currently around me, as if I were flying in the air without the plane. You could just use Google Maps data at first, but if someday they installed a few cameras on the exterior...