"charged customers 19 yuan ($2.90 USD) per umbrella deposit and an additional half yuan ($0.07 USD) per 30 minutes"
So customers holding on to their umbrellas are bring charged 3.36$/day? I've paid that much to buy umbrellas in london on rainy days. How is that not an incentive to return it? Or are the umbrellas just being stollen from the rails?
What is really worrying though is the normalization of privacy devaluation. Soon the uk will follow suite and then others. And sooner than later we ll be "back" to 1984
Isnt it weird that drasticly restrictive all encompassing rules are hastily pushed after attacks? Blanket Decryption of messages, and other privacy suppression rules will make intelligence agencies into super powers with too much control at a very reduced cost (less messy assassinations, or physical threats needed)
Makes sense. However, how is that going to protect the US? The moment such information is public, perpetrators will not transport any digital devices with incriminating data. What you re left with are people being harrassed over a digital copy of "how to make a potato launcher" on their laptops.
Frankly, it seems the US policing practices have been looking more and more USSR like. And i dont just mean since trump arrived to power.
I know that thesis. But i find that the middle class usually has a propensity to buying the more expensive items (even if it ends up being only marginally better than crap) because of a different dynamic. and it always puzzled me, i see it as an uninformed, irrationally positive, outlook generated by the mean fact of paying more for a "brand", because "surely it is better".
Exactly. Not forgetting that radiation protection has nothing to do with the hardness of the casing. Lead is nowhere near hard and is one of the most used materials to shield from radiations.
Sure, kids complicate things. They also have the unique attibute of being non-undoable. And life is surely much simpler without them. But aren't all enriching things in life complicated? Like love, starting a company, friendship, learning.
I have kids, and i dont think of people who decide not to have any as "wrong". This is clearly a personal choice, but i can definitely say they are missing out on a great source of richness, and tons of joy.
failures are at least as important a dataset as successes. Most technical entrepreneurs i know are very pattern oriented people. And in a way Reducing the datasets to successes will invitably bias their patterns one way.
If the goal of writing about startups is to encourage more entrepreneurs to take the plunge, writing about success is certainly a good way. However, if the goal is to help entrepreneurs make better decisions, and hopefully lead to a higher success rate, then sharing failure stories becomes necessary.
A research on how to unwind grudges after long term conflicts. Specially for large scale conflicts (as opposed to personal conflicts). A notorious example would be the Arab, Iraeli conflict. That is a conflict that affects me personally, and i ve always been worried about how, even if official peace treaties are signed, will the people get over the hate, fear of the other, the feeling of not having been vidicated. And the effect of such feeling on the peace.
A case that has always fascinated me is the german european relations post ww2, same for nippon-us relations, how did these pull it off?
Finding out the hows, and whys, can greatly help in improving global well being.
something that could benefit humanity on the long term is a wider "operating temperature" range. With the planet's weather getting more extreme, and the long term possibility of finding other habitable planets with an atmosphere that might be several degrees off, a human that feels comfortable in a wider temperature range will need spend far less external energy to accommodate. Consider how much electricity can be saved if people felt as confortable at 25deg C as they do at 22deg C.
In fact http://www.bowyers.com/bowyery_longbowOrigins.php says the contrary to what you are claiming, and in their account of the Cercy battle they clearly mention how the longbow outranged, and out-powered the crossbow (look for paragraph "Crecy 1346: the Longbow's Finest Day").
Excerpt 1: "The crossbowmen had a lethal range of up to about 80 yards, and took up an initial position 100 yards from the English, in line across the field. Unfortunately for them they quickly found out that the longbow now had a lethal range of well over 100 yards. "
Excerpt 2: "They were shocked to find that the longbows could now penetrate French armour, and could also down the horses."
In his book Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely described loss aversion by means of a set of experiments that go something like this:
A- take a person and promise her a substantial reward against completing a set of tasks. Measure stress level during tasks execution
B- take a person and give her the substantial reward up-front, but take back part of the reward for each task she fails. Measure stress level during tasks execution.
Ariely experiments showed stress was significantly higher with subjects that were in Experiment B. So much so that one of the subjects took the money and ran away by jumping out of a window. Ariely attributed the difference in stress levels to "Aversion to loss".
There is a difference between the scenario depicted by the experiments, and the cases in the OP's article. IN the article the author compares DMU as it changes from, say, 10K->2K vs 10K->18K, and argues that the latter has less impact than the former. Whereas in Ariely's experiments it is really comparing 2K-10K vs 10K-2K and showing that even if the Delta is the same, and both points are the same, subjects still experienced a different level of emotional distress due a visceral aversion to loss.
It is irrational to expect outstanding performance from an entity that does not have significant skin in your business. That's the rationale behind startups giving up shares to early employees. For contractors: more time= more profit. For Employees: better performance = more profit.
It is fascinating how much more information is in the article's comments section. In fact, I found many of the comments much more informative than the article itself. I recommend going through those to build a more informed opinion about the theory being discussed.
