I'm surprised at the incivility this comment's provoked in several of the respondents here. My guess is that those who are responding with hackles up and swords raised are misinterpreting the terms "supertaster" and "nontaster" and feeling slighted / offended… which really does nothing but show they've missed the point.
This is not some kind of hierarchy. A "supertaster" (25% of the population; NOT a rarity, for people talking about "claims" as if I said I helmed one of the Fortune 50 or could see through walls) is not superior to someone with a normal amount and distribution of tastebuds in his mouth or someone with a lower than normal amount. He does not have an exquisite palate, and he doesn't have naturally better "taste" than others. In fact, it makes your "taste" far worse: coffee, vegetables, fruit, fish, and the majority of fine dining options are all but unpalatable.
As for people accusing me of liking Hershey's milk chocolate itself - I don't like Hershey's chocolate bars or kisses. Never did. We're talking about the difference between two kinds of Kit Kat bars here, not all of Hershey's vs. all of some other chocolate brand.
My comment was a counter example to the article. The author made a very subjective post - which is fine - but then went on to argue that Hershey is clearly engaged in some sort of conspiracy to deny people delicious Kit Kats, which is not fine unless everyone shares his opinion that the alternative to the Kit Kat Hershey makes is more delicious… and not everyone does. My response could go one of two ways:
1. I could be angry and emotional (as some of my respondents were here), and call the guy a clown and an incompetent, and argue that he's all wrong because Hershey's Kit Kat is fine just the way it is, or
2. I could sit and see if I could come up with a possible reason why two people, one who's "accustomed" to Kit Kat in the United States, and the other, who also grew up accustomed to eating Kit Kat in the United States, had such different reactions on consuming Kit Kat outside the United States. Based on the author's description of his experience eating Kit Kat, which focused entirely on mouthfeel, he seemed to be judging "taste" by texture, which is what taste is to a nontaster.
To those who resorted to insults because their feelings were hurt, next time, before you break out your pitchfork, sit down for a moment and see if you can reason out the (non-emotional) difference between you and an article or comment author, rather than turning to insults, which are entirely unproductive and make you look like someone crying in his milk.
Your argument is that because I don't realize that some other brand of chocolate is superior to Hershey's chocolate, I'm not a supertaster?
Please read the Wikipedia article, or any research on, what a supertaster is. It is not a "person with more distinguished tastes", since these are wholly subjective and cultural constructs. Just as you believe in your own superiority for preferring Swiss chocolate over American chocolate (might you have refined taste in wine as well? [1]), a Chinese citizen no doubt realizes how superior his tastes are to yours for preferring his largely sugar-free chocolate to your (in his eyes) sickeningly sweet, additive-laden, and clearly unrefined dessert of choice.
And if your argument is that Hershey must certainly be producing what it produces in order to "take advantage of lax standards", you've much to learn about the nature of big business. Visit Asia some time, and you'll notice quite quickly how American chain Pizza Hut, which has adapted to the tastes of the locals by changing its recipes and producing all manner of pizzas largely unappealing to Americans but very appealing to Asians, is rapidly outcompeting other American chain Papa John's, which has stuck with its original American recipe, remaining tasty to Americans... but not so tasty to most Asians. Branded food businesses win by serving the market, not by cranking out crappy tasting morsels that cost less to produce. Those that go the latter route fail in their respective markets.
If Hershey is producing what it's producing to "take advantage of lax standards" and not because it's what the market wants, then the American chocolate industry is wide open for someone more willing to produce in line with what Americans want - and with a market as large as the dessert market in a nation of obese individuals, that'd be a pretty tempting niche to fill (maybe Nestle could do the job?). Yet, unless you can point to tremendously high barriers to entry keeping new entrants from the market, or somehow forcing Americans to buy Hershey instead of some of Dove, Nestle, Ferrero Rocher, etc., your premise seems flawed; the far simpler solution is simply that Hershey is winning the chocolate race in America not because it's skirting the rules, but because it's producing what its (so obviously unrefined) customers all want.
I agree, the Kit Kats outside of the U.S. are quite different from their U.S. counterparts. Although, to me, the taste of the Nestle-manufactured non-U.S. Kit Kat bars are far inferior to the Hershey-manufactured U.S. Kit Kat bars I grew up with. This might be down to the difference between those of us who are supertasters and are most focused on flavor, and those of us who are nontasters and are most focused on texture [1] . I notice that the author's points of contention revolve predominantly around texture, not flavor (chocolate heaven for him is "so rich, so smooth, so crunchy"), whereas when I think about the differences in the Kit Kats, my brain is entirely focused on taste and could care less about texture.
Being long-term situated outside the U.S., I frequently find myself wishing the Hershey-made Kit Kat bars were available to buy up and take to the movies here, but instead end up passing over the comparatively less appealing Nestle version and purchasing M&Ms, which mostly taste the same the world over (though I haven't had them in Hong Kong), instead.
When you're trying to use Google Apps for business, for one, and you go to email.MyURL.com and get redirected to a standard Google login screen where you now have to click a button to not sign in as your personal account, then come back and sign in as a business account, plus also add the "@MyURL.com" at the end (didn't used to have to do this), and you're doing that with multiple different accounts, it gets pretty tricky pretty in a hurry.
Of course many Americans number in the 3.5 billion most poor people on earth.
Source?
The actual data on this appears likely to refute your claim:
Yes, that’s right: America’s poorest are, as a group, about as rich as India’s richest. [1]
That's at least the better part of a billion right there America's poor are wealthier than in India. According to the graph in the article, America's poorest are also wealthier than nearly all of China (1.3 billion officially, 1.5 billion unofficially), and 2/3 of Brazil. Not including the rest of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
Am I the only one who spends 16 hours in front of a computer (mostly) working 6 days a week, managing staff exclusively through email and oDesk, and loves it? Maybe it's because I view the entrepreneurship stage as the filling between two sides of the cookie sandwich, with tons of partying, debauchery, and socialization in the years before I got into it, and tons of it on the other side once the damn thing's finally making enough money to hire a real management team to watch the stables for a while, while I go out and take a years-in-the-making vacation to end all vacations... then come back and get to work until I don't feel like working on business anymore.
I also don't use Facebook, Twitter, or anything else along those lines... if you want to reach me, you can email me, and I'll respond when I check email once every few days, or if you're one of the very few people who has access to my phone, you can call or text me and we can chat or grab dinner. No cyberstalking or hours lost to staring at social media inanity wondering why I'm not a part of all the pretend-excitement people portray themselves as engaging in for me. Wonder if this vicarious living through people's puffed up social lives on social media isn't a big part of why the author feels so left out.
Facebook may be targeting more traditional big brand advertisers than it is small business advertisers (who need ads to convert to sales in a much tighter window). e.g., the Coca-Cola commercial you see on TV probably doesn't make a single person get up out of his chair, go grab his car keys, and drive to the store and buy a Coke. Yet, over time, get exposed to enough of those ads, and when it's time to buy, your hand instinctively goes for the one your brain is bombarded with ads for all day.
Then again, Facebook ads give advertisers much less of an "in your face, brainwashing you against your will" impact than TV commercials do.
This might just be a case of a revenue model that simply doesn't fit the platform. It may be that Facebook is going to have to figure out another way to justify its high P/E ratio.
I've been using Stripe for just over a year now to take payments for a 6-figure-a-year business. We've had no reversals whatsoever. The only time Stripe has removed payments have been in the case of the occasional chargeback, which we typically win; payments seem to get docked the moment you file your response to the dispute, and get credited back the moment you're notified the dispute has been won.
I was a little nervous when first setting up with Stripe too, so we enabled it for a few hours and let a few sales go through, then switched back to our old merchant account and payment gateway while we waited to make absolutely sure the sales went through with Stripe. 7 days later, the payments hit our bank account, and we switched everything over to them - been happy ever since. They have a great dashboard, and everything's far easier to deal with and manage than it was with our old merchant account. Only downside is the pay delay - merchant account deposited most funds in our accounts within 2 days; Stripe takes 7. But if you're doing pretty consistent numbers, this isn't too much of a burden to cash flow, since you've got the funds from a week ago coming in every day.
Part of the reason we’re at the top of the food chain is that we are chemically rewarded when we are industrious – it is evolutionarily advantageous to be productive.
And we’re slowly and deviously being trained to forget this.
Good article, yet the author seems to be making the same mistake so many make - to assume that our present generations are being eroded away and forgetting how to be productive because the masses are hypnotized by social media and news on demand.
If you stop for a minute and look at what's being spread via social media and TV/Internet news, you quickly realize it's the exact same things that hunter-gatherers probably spend 99% of their downtime gossiping about too: this person said that thing; this guy slept with that girl; this guy has so many resources and isn't that so unfair to the rest of us; the guys in charge of tribal society have secretly been spying on all of us, isn't that scary... social media and online news isn't changing anything more than the mediums we gossip through and making said gossip more permanent and apparent and less ephemeral and transitory than it's previously been. But just because it's still there doesn't mean people are spending much time obsessing over the gossips of yesterday; just like those in tribal societies, the news of yesterday is quickly forgotten, and soon supplanted by the urgent, pressing news of TODAY.
I'm pretty sure in Archimedes's or Newton's days most people weren't sitting around removed from society on their parents' farms inventing calculus, or holed up in towers devising calculating machines and giant ship incendiary weapons... rather, they were going to the county dance, swilling home-brewed beer with the neighbors, and gossiping about the same things we gossip about today: wasn't it scandalous how Ellyn was behaving with the men at the dance? Isn't it a crime how much the poor are taxed by the local lord, while he lives in luxury? How unfair it is that the law applies so unevenly between peasant and lord! Can you believe that Brom and Beatrix are fighting again?
Despite the very long period of leisure that medieval peasants had during wintertime, not a whole lot of scientific or technological progress came out of the peasantry. While I agree there's little more satisfying than building something yourself, I'd differ with the article in suggesting that the masses of people today are in fact no different than the masses of people of times past - a minority produces new things, while the majority handles the day-to-day of maintaining what we've already got, and spends its leisure time consuming the output of those producers who've successfully managed to produce things others want and/or things useful to those others.
Much as I'd like to see some kind of "tidal wave of people doing this", purely in the interests of sending a message to somebody somewhere that data sniffing = not cool, I don't personally know anyone who's taken the time or energy to move all his data off of bugged U.S. servers onto bugged European or Asian ones or attempted to host it himself in less-efficient email clients, etc., nor plans to, nor do I hear very many people online talking about doing this, nor planning to, nor have I done this myself, nor do I plan to.
There's a lot of pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth going on right now in the blogosphere, but strikingly few people actually doing anything, and the actual movement looks more like a tiny ripple in an otherwise calm tide pool than it does a 100-story wave.
I suspect that until better, easier-to-use services come along than the ones being skewered in this post, most people are simply going to stay right where they are.
And once those services do come along, and attract a large enough user base, I'm pretty certain they will in turn attract agencies like the NSA (or whatever the local government equivalent may be, if not in the U.S.), showing up with hands out and secret court orders up.
If privacy was paramount to people, no one would be on Facebook (I'm certainly not, and haven't been for years). Yet, Facebook, much as everyone constantly complains about its blatant disregard for users' privacy, seems to be doing just fine, with its billion or so users and its $80 billion valuation.
The Internet is living, breathing, functioning proof that, at least to 99.9999% of human beings, utility > privacy. Unless the U.S. government starts skimming off the top of people's bank accounts, I don't think there's going to be much of a mass exodus any time soon - the motivation simply isn't there.
My guess is that these cases are dysfunctions with aspects of the growth / maturation process, rather than outright stoppage of aging. If you look up images of Nicky Freeman, the 40-year-old referenced in the article who "looks like a 10-year-old", he in fact looks more like a 40-year-old with the size and stature of a 10-year-old:
The site appears to have Google Analytics placed multiple times into its source code. This messes up tracking and artificially dramatically drops bounce rates.
In my experience working with content sites, the real bounce rate reduction you see in moving from shorter articles to longer ones is closer to 5% or so - from, say, 77% to 72%. Still dramatic, but not nearly as dramatic as the drop you'll get by double-inserting GA code.
Very often, the marriages where partners never considered nor discussed potential exit strategies should things not work out are the very same ones that, just like with the business partnerships where this is neglected, end up taking messy detours through the legal system on the way out.
I'll chime in here and say that reading this article sounded exactly like reading about my own 3 previous (failed) partnerships.
My sole successful venture has been solo all along (not including employees), and has outlasted the rises and falls of the other businesses (during the amateur entrepreneur "too many fingers in too many pies" phase). I don't think I'd do a partnership again. But maybe I just don't play well with others?
Anyway, can't speak for the OP, but when intelligent, ambitious friends around you see that you work your tail off and already have succeeded at building a profitable business from scratch, they suddenly get really excited about starting new businesses with you that often sound great. At least in my experience though, many of these people turn out to see themselves as "the visionary" who kinda sorta checks in from time to time and you as "the worker," which, if that isn't the role you're interested in, causes things to unravel rather fast.
Worth noting that teleportation also necessitates the destruction of your previous "you" along with creation of a duplicate "you." Even if it was workable without the massive amounts of time or energy stated in the article, there'd be some obvious ethical dilemmas - the process kills original you in the process of copying and recreating original you.
Interestingly, in the long run this probably doesn't "matter" for anyone else or even your role in the universe, because there's still a perfect copy of you doing exactly what you would have done, so it's like you didn't die. But you did still die... and dying is rather scary for most people.
She said: "While I'm pleased they're listening, it's taken Twitter a week to come up with this.
"Twitter's 'report abuse' button on the iPhone application goes through to the old reporting form. What we're looking for is an overhaul of the system which sits behind the button.
"The current process is lengthy, complicated and impossible to use if you're under sustained attack like I have been.
"Right now, all the emphasis is on the victim, often under intense pressure, to report rather than for Twitter to track down the perpetrator and stop them."
-----------------
Two thoughts:
One, the expectations here for the turnaround time for Twitter to add new functionality to its system seem to be somewhat unrealistic.
Two, perhaps Twitter wants users reporting abuse to fill out a form (perhaps they could make it shorter if it's overly lengthy) as a filter to make sure only real abuse cases are filed, as opposed to, say, a system where anyone who doesn't like a Tweet clicks an abuse button, and that Tweet is immediately censored, or one in which Twitter hires a team of 50 outsourcers to manually sort through tens of thousands of daily abuse claims.
Perhaps we should have a separate section or tab on here for political news if it's very important to some people.
I, for one, like HN because it doesn't have all the usual political news nonsense that mainstream news has. The privacy debate is great and all, but it doesn't substantially help my or anyone's lives on here. In 400 years, it's not going to matter whether the NSA read your emails or didn't read your emails. And realistically, reading another article about Edward Snowden impersonating Tom Hanks in a Russian airport terminal isn't going to push the meter toward or away greater privacy an ounce.
However, if you find informative, non-buried-under-political-stuff articles on HN that contribute to you building your business empire that changes the world for the better a little bit... that probably will still matter in 400 years.
You mean no one really objects to people drinking enough to make bad decisions with one another, then hating themselves for it so much that they... proceed to go out again and get drunk again and make bad decisions with one another again, and do it over and over and over again?
You might almost think people like sex and alcohol from all this insanity. Next thing you know, they'll be opening up establishments where men and women go to get drunk and pick each other for sloppy drunk scores. That'll be the day...
This one appears to have lived and died as a prototype. Any mention of it after this article has only referenced what original information and images are available on the prototyper's 2010 site. [1]
Fab@Home seems to be closer to digitally printing food, though it doesn't seem like any time soon: "Lipton thinks that fabricating a dish of steak and potatoes from scratch is still 15 to 20 years or more in the future." [2]
This is not some kind of hierarchy. A "supertaster" (25% of the population; NOT a rarity, for people talking about "claims" as if I said I helmed one of the Fortune 50 or could see through walls) is not superior to someone with a normal amount and distribution of tastebuds in his mouth or someone with a lower than normal amount. He does not have an exquisite palate, and he doesn't have naturally better "taste" than others. In fact, it makes your "taste" far worse: coffee, vegetables, fruit, fish, and the majority of fine dining options are all but unpalatable.
As for people accusing me of liking Hershey's milk chocolate itself - I don't like Hershey's chocolate bars or kisses. Never did. We're talking about the difference between two kinds of Kit Kat bars here, not all of Hershey's vs. all of some other chocolate brand.
My comment was a counter example to the article. The author made a very subjective post - which is fine - but then went on to argue that Hershey is clearly engaged in some sort of conspiracy to deny people delicious Kit Kats, which is not fine unless everyone shares his opinion that the alternative to the Kit Kat Hershey makes is more delicious… and not everyone does. My response could go one of two ways:
1. I could be angry and emotional (as some of my respondents were here), and call the guy a clown and an incompetent, and argue that he's all wrong because Hershey's Kit Kat is fine just the way it is, or
2. I could sit and see if I could come up with a possible reason why two people, one who's "accustomed" to Kit Kat in the United States, and the other, who also grew up accustomed to eating Kit Kat in the United States, had such different reactions on consuming Kit Kat outside the United States. Based on the author's description of his experience eating Kit Kat, which focused entirely on mouthfeel, he seemed to be judging "taste" by texture, which is what taste is to a nontaster.
To those who resorted to insults because their feelings were hurt, next time, before you break out your pitchfork, sit down for a moment and see if you can reason out the (non-emotional) difference between you and an article or comment author, rather than turning to insults, which are entirely unproductive and make you look like someone crying in his milk.