41–50 of 73 posts
When playing a board game, like Terra Mystica, where there are choices I can make, and there are random elements that change from game to game, there's two routes I could go - The first is to play out the plan I've thought about so many times previously, to align the choices I make with that plan as faithfully as the random elements allow. The second, is to completely ditch whatever was in my plan, look at the random…
How is the decision to do software because the moneys there not playing to the board?
The board game analogy is pretty apt. In The Settlers of Catan, players compete to reach 10 Victory Points by developing a robust and healthy colony. Settlements are worth one VP each, and upgrading one to a city makes it worth two. The city also pays out double resources, and it's relatively difficult to stop a player from building cities. I might observe that players who win tend build all their settlements and upgrade as many of them into cities as possible, so I decide going into this game that's what I'll do. I decided on that strategy without actually taking this game's state into account, and I will probably not do very well if this game is unlike games I've seen before.
Alternately, I might just build whatever seems appropriate given the resources I'm getting. This is "playing the board." The strategy for this game is based on the current game's state, not general knowledge of the game's rules in a vacuum or observations of prior games.
If someone studies historical trends and concludes that people with skills related to broadly applicable inventions will get paid a lot, like people who can make steam engines or program computers, they're using the first strategy. They didn't look at today's conditions at all, they noted that life in general seems to cause good salaries and specific types of skills to coexist. If they instead just show up to their first day of college, look up the average starting salaries for recent graduates in every department, and join one with the highest number that they feel confident they can graduate from, they're using the second strategy. The end result could be identical and they wind up writing software either way, but the strategies were formed using totally different methods.
What a totally organic and subtle way of advertising. Ugh. Get lost.
Searching for the word tomotcha shows a single submission and a few mentions over the past year.
One week it's Hemingway and the next week perhaps it's Elmore Leonard. You decorate the store and the key is the author has many books and you stock them all. In a place like Tokyo, NYC or London this approach might work.
It would almost be like an art gallery highlighting dozens of paintings by a single artist. You could invite people in to discuss the author and those events would draw in even more people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This Christmas reminded me that as long as there are people like me, who leave shopping for presents to the last minute, physical stores with large stock aren't going anywhere. But I am definitely waiting for the moment when physical stores turn into a purely advertising space, and draw their revenue from there. In a very near future you might not be able to buy things at a store, you will only be able to look at and…
> Clothes are an exception here If I could buy all my clothes online I would. The problem is sizes are at best a rough guid - different brands and even different styles in the same brand, fit completely differently. I guess I could find one outfit that fits and then just buy that online when I need a replacement :)
Then have those be searchable and selectable on the store.
Getting people to actually do their own body measurement could be a problem though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People do pay for advice, though. Financial advice in particular has an obvious unbundled market (not just in the form of "your guy at the investment bank", but also in the form of stock analysis, industry reports, etc. Bloomberg terminals are pure "advice", if you want to think of things this way.) Slightly more murkily, though, we've got things like fashion advice, where you pay a "fashion consultant" who works wit…
Doctors are a special case in that, for better or worse, you have to go through them to get a lot of medicines. (And IMO by and large that system makes sense.) Outside of Bloomberg terminals which are a relative high-end niche, most individual investors get their research and financial advice bundled with transaction and management fees. I basically agree with your other points. But, relatively speaking, things like…
http://www.takram.com/projects/a-single-room-with-a-single-b...
...looks to be an exercise in branding/design.
I'm wondering if a community will form around the 50 or so titles stocked in a year. A book per week is a reasonable reading target for most educated people. If so, then a coffee shop model becomes possible: a coffee shop stocking one title per week and encouraging discussion while continuing to sell their coffee and food to pay the rent.
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2015/09/06/morioka-shoten-ginza-...