Nice linkbait headline
"Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
71–80 of 164 posts
Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
#72At some point an individual has to come to terms with the fact that 99% (or some equally large percentage) of human economic activity has nothing much to do with improving the human condition, but is rather beer and circuses writ large. You can cure a disease for the cost of a large video game development these days, and an election year of political donations in the US could be used to cure aging. Medical research i…
You don't believe art and sport improve the human condition? I would argue that what you dismiss as circuses are actually what make life living.
Being a scientist or engineer is fine, but is far from the only way to make the world better. Life would be very drab if all art and sport stopped tommorrow.
Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
#73[deleted]
Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
#74At some point an individual has to come to terms with the fact that 99% (or some equally large percentage) of human economic activity has nothing much to do with improving the human condition, but is rather beer and circuses writ large. You can cure a disease for the cost of a large video game development these days, and an election year of political donations in the US could be used to cure aging. Medical research i…
The total cost of the 2012 election was $6.3 billion, about half of which was the Presidential election, so over a period of 4 years you're looking at roughly 2.4 billion per year. That would do jack shit for curing aging or even an important disease. The NIH spends $30 billion per year on those things.
We do the beer and circuses because they're cheaper than large-scale human advancements. The Manhattan project was $30 billion. Apollo was about $135 billion. The interstate highway system was $400-500 billion. (Inflation adjusted).
Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about selfishness, it's just that most easy problems got solved, and we're left with really really hard ones. Cancer is so mind-boggingly complex that one person cannot even begin to look at ways to solve it on his own. Think about web developers, for example. We can either develop some SaaS website in 6 months that will bring us something like $500/month, or we can attack the cancer problem for 30 years and…
Or, just throwing this out there as an option, you could solve any problem for a physician's practice -- like, say, patients not complying with their treatment regimen by failing to make scheduled check ups. You might even be able to do that with a SaaS app. Granted, it won't cure cancer, but you'll save more lives at the margin than doing Zynga ads. (And, n.b., healthcare clients often have more than $500 available…
The company I work for does exactly this actually, and there are others like us. The problem is that due to heavy regulations/HIPAA, we have to sell our services to companies who can use it with their provided insurance.
You can't just set up a service with a Facebook log in and have people connecting medical information, so it's not something that's going to end up getting viral or posted on blogs or TechCrunch, and the only people that are going to see your service are the ones that work for our clients.
I can't even put 99% of what I do on a regular basis into a portfolio or anything because of these regulations.
I guess my point is there _are_ companies doing things like this, while being successful and social conscious, they just won't be publicized like Angry Birds or the Find-Vegan-Bacon-In-SF-Apps.
Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those milliseconds being shaved off forex trading are the reason that commercial and retail spreads are much tighter than they were a decade ago. When currencies were priced every second market makers had to set a spread that would protect them from market variance within that one-second period, as that time period shrunk the amount of risk dropped as did the spreads. Think about the thousands of currency transaction…
I've never understood the claim that "market makers" are providing a valuable service in the stock market by providing liquidity and reducing spreads. If this is a necessary service, why aren't there market makers in every market? My local grocery wants to sell bananas for $1.50 a pound, but I only want to pay $1.00. Why isn't there a market maker buying and selling these bananas thousands of times per second to redu…
> No market maker is needed
That doesn't mean that market makers don't provide value, just that they are not necessary.
Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
#77I don't think the people who work on these "useless" apps are to blame, rather it's the system in which they are brought up in and in case of start-ups, are taught entrepreneurship in. Paul Graham himself says he advises every start-up to "work on something for which they are the initial market"[0], so every YC cycle you get numerous companies which solve the problems of young San Francisco residents ([1] for comic r…
"Meanwhile, your doctor in the hospital is stuck using some 1980's software, which drains the very life-force out of him by the amount of pain it inflicts with every use..."
Most of the problems with medical software is the doctors and medical administrators themselves. They get so used to be worshiped as Gods That Save Lives, they assume that they Know Everything About Everything. I've seen more software and business talent quit the medical software field than any other....
Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about selfishness, it's just that most easy problems got solved, and we're left with really really hard ones. Cancer is so mind-boggingly complex that one person cannot even begin to look at ways to solve it on his own. Think about web developers, for example. We can either develop some SaaS website in 6 months that will bring us something like $500/month, or we can attack the cancer problem for 30 years and…
Or, just throwing this out there as an option, you could solve any problem for a physician's practice -- like, say, patients not complying with their treatment regimen by failing to make scheduled check ups. You might even be able to do that with a SaaS app. Granted, it won't cure cancer, but you'll save more lives at the margin than doing Zynga ads. (And, n.b., healthcare clients often have more than $500 available…
How?
Making software for government is like a two year bidding process. The barriers to entry are incredibly high when it should just be a case of, "Okay, you want X Y and Z as your most critical features, let's keep the initial product small, we can add features as we go along. It'll be done in two months and then we'll iterate."
Instead it's more like, "We're going to have bids for two years for the project and then we're going to want everything done in one pass."
The NHS tried to update their computer systems a while back, it cost them £12 billion and two contractors dropped out of the contract because they were being too difficult to work with. It's still not, I believe, fully deployed.
The BBC tried updating their media management system.... DMI, I believe it was called. And spent £98.5 million on it only to not get the product at the end of the day....
All for things that a reasonable software company could probably have done by iterating over features on a basic product fairly easily.
Then you have things like the Police computer system - which is laughable in its antiquity and difficulty to use. I think there was an article on here quite recently about the awful 911 system.
You know? Things need to change concerning regulation before I think we're going to be able to adequately address those sorts of problems. Otherwise you're going to get these monster projects that effectively have to be done all in one go, which seems like a recipe for disaster.
Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those milliseconds being shaved off forex trading are the reason that commercial and retail spreads are much tighter than they were a decade ago. When currencies were priced every second market makers had to set a spread that would protect them from market variance within that one-second period, as that time period shrunk the amount of risk dropped as did the spreads. Think about the thousands of currency transaction…
I've never understood the claim that "market makers" are providing a valuable service in the stock market by providing liquidity and reducing spreads. If this is a necessary service, why aren't there market makers in every market? My local grocery wants to sell bananas for $1.50 a pound, but I only want to pay $1.00. Why isn't there a market maker buying and selling these bananas thousands of times per second to redu…
Your grocer is a market maker!
To the point that the word market is often used for small stores.
If you had to buy bananas off a truck when it happened to be in town, you'd get a lot less bananas and you'd pay more for them.
Re: "Instead of cures for cancer we got Angry Birds"
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those milliseconds being shaved off forex trading are the reason that commercial and retail spreads are much tighter than they were a decade ago. When currencies were priced every second market makers had to set a spread that would protect them from market variance within that one-second period, as that time period shrunk the amount of risk dropped as did the spreads. Think about the thousands of currency transaction…
I've never understood the claim that "market makers" are providing a valuable service in the stock market by providing liquidity and reducing spreads. If this is a necessary service, why aren't there market makers in every market? My local grocery wants to sell bananas for $1.50 a pound, but I only want to pay $1.00. Why isn't there a market maker buying and selling these bananas thousands of times per second to redu…
You seem to be confusing a few different things here.
One of the fundamental purpose of a market maker is ensuring that both the supply and demand sides are capable of transacting when they want to, even if the supply and demand side don't necessarily want to trade at the same time.
So say the farmer only wants to sell bananas on a Monday and you only want to buy them on Thursday, so you can never do the transaction. So your grocer by buying the bananas when they're available and selling to them when you want them is in fact taking on some of the role of a market maker.
The reason that bananas don't need high-speed market making however is that the underlying supply and demand for bananas is pretty stable (I'm just guessing here; I don't know anything about the banana market). With currencies the supply and demand is in constant shift, everything from news events to someone making an online purchase in a foreign currency contributes to the shift. So a large part of the premium you pay for currencies is to manage that risk of the underlying supply/demand shifting. So by reducing that risk you can have lower premiums.
Say your grocer bought their bananas at $1 and was selling them at $1.50, what percentage of that 50 cents do you think goes towards managing the risk that the demand for bananas will collapse and the bananas might not be worth $1 any more ? - I'm guessing none of it because the bananas will likely spoil before the price of bananas shifts that much. Hence reducing that risk is pointless in the banana market.
HTH