121–130 of 401 posts
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Netflix provides on-demand all you can view content. It doesn’t require any “cooling period” before the next episode. You don’t have to engage with family, friends or work. You can stream all day and live in fantasyland.
> You can stream all day and live in fantasyland. I tried that. It soon becomes utterly boring, no matter how good the show is.
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Yeah, the day I realized that the economic notion of value was weighted according to the wealth of those creating the demand, while the colloquial definition generally isn't, a lot of mismatched puzzle pieces fell into place. It was probably the single most successful update to my worldview (measured in terms of predictive power) that I have ever made.
Can you expand on this insight about weighting value and its predictive power or share a source?
Successful parents and sage founders define value differently.
They don't see dollars. They see sense.
> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add acti…
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In my eyes China is a technocratic autocracy, not a dictatorship. This would explain the hypothesis why they want their brains to work on rockets rather than ad tech, as OP assumed.
This might have been true, but then Xi changed the law to be ruler for life.
Term limits are horrible for the working class in the U.S. Constant political turnover means groups like ALEC basically run our legislating process. Killing term limits for certain offices means that as someone gains experience and competence, they continue to lead, whereas in the U.S. they'd arbitrarily have to leave office right when they're getting the lay of the land.
It'd be like firing our senior dev and putting in a junior – no wonder shit never gets done in the States.
> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add acti…
Hijacking this comment a bit, but I haven't watched real TV in a very long time but have been tuning in again because of the Olympics and Jeopardy. I'm seeing an incredible amount of ads for companies that let you gamble real money on your phone. Sometimes it's back to back to back to back commercials for online app casinos. This seems really dangerous and a sign of a tragically unhealthy and predatory economy - I ca…
It was actually less regulated. There were gambling sites for children based on electronic collectibles from video games. It was becoming a billion dollar industry before Steam put their foot down.
A friend was close to launching a venture in the space and their first year revenue projections were around 600k assuming middling/unimpressive growth (he was a teenager at the time, didn't really register how fucked up the business was). Medium-sized ventures in this space raked in several million and the largest were definitely bringing in tens of millions of dollars. I know at some point there were concerns of money laundering...
Playtika just IPO'd for 12B and they seem to mostly make gambling apps. I've seen people play them on planes and it's slightly disturbing. I took an SF -> Miami redeye once and a lady seemingly played it during the entire flight.
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I know this is just semantics but I actually like 'technocratic autocracy' better than any sort of oligopoly to describe China. There are no other poles of power, the army even reports directly to the party rather than the government. And, so far, they've been quite dynamic on the technocratic front, people get fired for incompetence despite having a political base.
> There are no other poles of power, the army even reports directly to the party rather than the government. I think you have a point with your use of "technocratic," but it is an oligarchy. The party is the olígos. Autocracy implies stuff like the army reports to the leader, not the party. I think things are trending that way, but I don't think it's historically accurate (at least for the last several decades).
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I know the point you're trying to make; it's ubiquitous . The point I'm making is that "free markets" won't answer the question either, and often result in things that are obviously against "value to society." One little thing I find annoying is that whenever someone points out some issue with free markets, someone always seems to reply with something that amounts to "have you considered free markets?" Whatever the p…
I also think it's wrong to assume that the example of the Soviet Union proves anything. Maybe Free Markets were the best you could do with the quantitative decision-making tools available to Stalin, and maybe central planning with modern AI/ML/Operations Research techniques would be more successful than a free-market approach. Or maybe, the Soviet Union would have done just fine if there were no United States trying…
- Arthur Jensen (Network, 1976)
> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add acti…
If you really believe that entertainment doesn't improve the human experience, I feel sorry for you.
> China may simply see things differently. It’s possible that the Chinese government has decided that the profits of companies like Alibaba and Tencent come more from rents than from actual value added Excellent observation, and I hope, for China's sake, that this is the reason. The United States is likely in for a long-term rude awakening when it finally realizes that an economy predicated on negative-value-add acti…
I'll bet you could pick up a random op-ed from a 1960s Readers' Digest and someone would be making the argument that Americans spend too much time watching TV and pouring their creative energies into advertising, cosmetics and pop records while the Soviets are conquering outer space and South East Asia.
Also, the moon landing.
So much of the work done at Google and Facebook seems to be solving general computing problems. That's how we got things like React and k8s that aren't specific to advertisements at all. On top we constantly complain about app the projects cancelled by Google. All these projects were build by someone and rarely are directly related to serving advertisements. Not to mention all the very valuable products provided by Google many of us use every day that provide tremendous value despite Google's ultimate goal of serving ads. Gmail, Maps, Docs, Calendar, YouTube, Google Voice and probably many more. Not to mention products we ridicule for their unnecessary changes and internal competitors like Meet/Hangouts. Pie on the sky stuff like self driving cars. AI advancements like Tensor flow. They have a leading security project that slowed down all out CPUs ;)
What percentage of work at Google is in fact directly "wasted" on advertisements?