421–430 of 437 posts
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I agree - we should get more people to think in singular they, rather than just write.
I don't like this kind of thinking police, sound too 1984ish to me.
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Oh please. Humanity is pretty much the definition of a species that should, in all probability, have died out on a multitude of occasions over the years and I am not just talking about the world wars and Nuclear Bombs, but things like the plagues, Spanish flu and all the rest of the diseases; the host of predators for which we are no match at all (a standard monkey is stronger than all but the best trained humans), t…
Amusingly that's not a bad argument that we're living in a simulation. Disregarding any particular human, humanity itself has done remarkably well against the odds in the same sense that story-book characters do remarkably well against the odds and that, at least when they're on a winning trend, player-controlled populations (whether in Populous, C&C, etc.) do well against the video game's odds or against other playe…
Once humanity spread around the world, the odds of a natural catastrophe killing all of us at the same time became very low (limited to planetary-scale distasters).
Only since the industrial revolution we've been on a more dangerous path toward central points of failure. On a geological time scale, that's only a very short time. But we've been testing our luck really hard.
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Oh please. Humanity is pretty much the definition of a species that should, in all probability, have died out on a multitude of occasions over the years and I am not just talking about the world wars and Nuclear Bombs, but things like the plagues, Spanish flu and all the rest of the diseases; the host of predators for which we are no match at all (a standard monkey is stronger than all but the best trained humans), t…
Amusingly that's not a bad argument that we're living in a simulation. Disregarding any particular human, humanity itself has done remarkably well against the odds in the same sense that story-book characters do remarkably well against the odds and that, at least when they're on a winning trend, player-controlled populations (whether in Populous, C&C, etc.) do well against the video game's odds or against other playe…
That said I get the simulation theory feeling pretty solid sometimes, to the point where grappling with it is one of the major themes of the graphic novel I'm in the middle of...
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What about this? "In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF That's 54 jumbo jets a day. I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.
That's an important problem. But my list was a list of startup ideas, not important problems generally. I'm not certain the problem of water supplies is best addressed by for profit companies (it might, but I'm not sure), so it doesn't make a good example to put on a list of startup ideas.
Our goal has to be to make the world a better place, not simply to make a few of us more more money than we can spend.
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One big deal in Africa is logistics. The railways of the colonized era were designed from quickly moving raw materials to ports. And the new Chinese-built roads are no different. The end result is that trucking food between cities and villages not that far away from each other is crazy slow, dangerous, and profitable. Not much differently from trans-Pacific trade some 100-150 years ago. If somebody would come up with…
Airships? How did Europe go from crappy roads to good roads? Not with airships.
The point here is to figure out a way to fix logistics in a way that individual entrepreneurs can do it.
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Unfortunately there's isn't much I can say until we launch, but here goes: we've created a social network where email is the mode of communication, and everything is organized around people and organizations. There isn't a single inbox as such, there are people, and groups of people, with correspondence between them. Like in Facebook or a CRM system. What Gmail query do you have to do to see the correspondence betwee…
I don't know what your product is or does, but from what I just read, it doesn't seem to be very innovative. You're building a faster horse instead of a car. The solution lays in semantic communication. As long as you mainly communicate with text that someone has to read, analyze and understand, you're doing it wrong.
Chat / IM is text and yet that isn't a problematic communication medium because there is a small set of people you chat to. The problem isn't the number of emails, sentences or words, its the number of people we are connected with, its relationship management.
Sure some magical AI to read emails and books for you, summarize them and even reply for you may be great. Or organize your mail into folders for you based on clustering or some ontology. The problem is these solutions never work.
Our focus is on organizing mail around people, and in turn organizing people into groups, which is not some magical silver bullet, but still a radical improvement over an unorganized mailbox.
These ideas, and the idea that they are frighteningly ambitious, clearly come from the personal experience of living in northern California and dealing with tech startups most of your time. These are largely first world problems. Here are some ambitious ideas: - distributed power generation that's cheap enough and renewable enough so people in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa don't have brown outs anymore. - synthet…
desalination that is cheap enough for a farmer in Mozambique to do himself
I am sorry, but you can not fix broken states with technology. Want to help Mozambique and sub-Saharan people? Find a way to turn their governments into well working ones. This is at once infinitely more difficult and also the only thing which will really solve the common developing world problems.
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Language tends to be very strongly intertwined with culture as the main means for conveying said culture. So I'm curious in what way you feel culturally closer to Germany. (disclaimer: I have spent about 80% of my life in Austria and about 18% in Britain, speak both languages but identify much more strongly with British culture)
But the English language is mostly a germanic language, and the British people have mostly germanic DNA. Contrasting Austria and Britain is not that big of a divide. A better contrast would be between Britian/Germany/Austria and one of the latin countries, or a slavic country, etc. When the US was founded, there were essentially two separate civilizations within the countries borders. This was true until one annihila…
Even with the narrow definition of culture, I can't say I agree. Austrian society is rather conservative. There may be progressive and industrious individuals, but I certainly not the country as a whole. I haven't lived in Germany, but I'd certainly say British people are more liberally minded and individualistic than Austrians.
Despite their disdain for politicians, Austrians will typically expect the state to solve their problems, and accept paying vast amounts in taxes. An example of this is higher education: the majority expects it to be completely free for students, very much at the expense of quality.
The civil service is enormous, inefficient and somewhat corrupt, but it seems to be accepted as a requirement for stability and welfare as a huge provider of jobs. Contrast this to the British fears of a "nanny state" and general grumbling about taxation.
Here's my theory how the differences came about:
1. You're right to point out a certain north/south gradient across Europe, but you're forgetting that Austria and Bavaria were historically the centre of the counter-reformation, unlike central and northern Germany. So, for a long time, very much catholic like southwestern Europe; even anti-protestant. Religion obviously has very much taken a back seat in recent decades, but culture (there's that word again) changes much more slowly.
2. The Austro-Hungarian Empire used to stretch deep into the Balkan and Eastern Europe. Although the German language dominates today, Slavic and Hungarian surnames and people's appearances today still hint at a past where Austria, and Vienna as the capital in particular, was much more heterogeneous. Even the use of the German language is also not quite as straightforward as it seems: the names for many foods are different from those used in Germany and have Slavic, Hungarian and Italian origins. (and I would personally consider food to be a part of a society's culture)
The English-German connection you point out is, by the way, quite far in the past. The Norman invasion of England injected a lot of latin vocabulary into the English language, and that was in the 11th century.
I'm not trying to make a moral judgment by the way; I have family in and from both countries. I can't predict which country will be more prosperous in 50 or 100 years' time; Austrians are probably the happier ones at the moment. I'll readily admit to having my own strong opinions on whether it will stay that way, but that's not really the point here.
For what it's worth, I likewise can't really comment on the differences in culture across the United States from personal experience. I'd be surprised, though, if the differences were as big as across Europe. (I'm leaving aside insular communities such as the Amish who deliberately do not mix with general society; you get those everywhere, and their populations tend to be small)
Already, some really innovative initiatives are getting around this problem. The Pasadena Bioscience Collaborative offers lab space and equipment for ~$1,000 per month (no contract required!) and the EMBARK program administers scientists grants and encourages them to outsource experiments to core facility specialists (while providing access to a basic shared lab for those experiments that can't be easily outsourced). Both initiatives offer ways for scientists to avoid high indirect costs and burdensome admin - and importantly the scientists retain 100% of their IP!
These initiatives are the way of the future - it's hard to see how big, inefficient universities will be able to attract the top talent for much longer.