When I went into residency, my attending once described any drug acting on reuptake (be it antagonistically, agonistic, or in a bifurcated model) as the medical equivalency of noticing your car is low on oil and, in response, pouring a few dozen liters of the stuff over the engine block.
Some gets to where it needs to be, the rest gunks up the engine on the outside and in places it shouldn't be.
Almost any drug acting on 5HT (fk acts on 2C), acts on other receptors as well. Fk acts on α1, M1-4, and many more, it's not very selective. A venerable bucket of oil, indeed. This is, what also causes Long-QT, feeding disorders, diarrhea, shorter pregnancies, dry mouth, sexual dysfunction, and more.
Sure, dropping such a bucket of oil can also, via inflammatory pathways, elicit IL-10 activation and, more importantly, act against hypertriglyceridemia. But that should not be sold as a solution to a problem. Again, to stay with contrived comparisons, if I load the boot of a car with C4, I am sure that some parts of the car will reach more than the car's stated maximum speed. But that's not a desirabe outcome.
As a last ditch, I'd consider it. But "preventatively" as suggested... that's a far, far, reach.
The solution for homelessness isn't something like a sleeping pod or capsule hotels. The solution for homelessness is 3-fold:
- Secure, stable housing
- Free mental health care, substance abuse care
- Reliable and robust public transportation
Without those 3 things minimum, any other solution to the homelessness crisis will not succeed.
Access to jobs, food, and sanitary conditions is limited without stable housing. Without mental health care and substance abuse care, those with mental illnesses or substance abuse problems will not be able to adapt to the changing environment, become employable, or maintain long-term housing. And without reliable transportation, getting to grocery stores, work, etc is nearly impossible in most US cities, let alone smaller towns.
Any other solution is slapping a Hello Kitty bandaid on a gunshot wound and kicking the can further down the road for someone else to deal with.
EDIT: An organization that's local to me here in Atlanta that is succeeding very well is the Trans Housing Coalition(1). While they specifically focus their efforts on PoC transwomen in the Atlanta area they've been very successful in their work.
Well, this has nothing to do with programming and goes way beyond being merely "useless"; yet it might offer some perspective on your question and perhaps help you relativise things.
There's a global industry involving thousands of healthcare professionals, lawyers, judges, police officers, and child protection workers who have spent 50 years prosecuting tens of thousands of parents and caregivers for allegedly shaking their babies. This is based on a theory from the 1970s, which posits that virtually all infants with blood around the brain and at the back of the eyes have been violently shaken. These professionals have developed entire academic journals, conferences, curricula, and training courses to teach this "theory" to all involved professionals (hospital clinicians, police officers, prosecutors, etc.). There are likely hundreds of such courses annually in dozens of countries. These people have raised probably tens of millions of dollars for research and prevention programs against shaking which, while somewhat beneficial for the well-being of babies, have not succeeded in reducing the global incidence of shaken baby syndrome diagnoses.
It turns out this theory is largely incorrect, and only a minority of cases are likely to be actual cases of abuse: the other children suffer from rare diseases or household accidents that cause these types of bleeding, which are mistaken for signs of abuse. Every year, thousands of babies are removed from their homes and hundreds of parents and caregivers are convicted and incarcerated.
This has been known for over 20 years, with more and more professionals raising the alarm, yet the diagnoses continue to be made every day. I discovered this 8 years ago and swore to myself that I would do anything I can to end it. At the time, I met doctors who had been trying to do the same for over 15 years, and here I am, 8 years later, doing everything I can but still feeling quite lonely and helpless. I still hope to think I'm not entirely useless. But more importantly, think about all these professionals who have built an entire industry on false premises, leaving a trail of devastation around the world under the guise of "child protection", convinced they are making the world a better place. Does this fit your definition of "useless"?
There's a much more informative article available here. [1] Stabilization does not have the colloquial meaning. It's defined as, "To provide such medical treatment of the condition as may be necessary to assure, within reasonable medical probability, that no material deterioration of the condition is likely to result from or occur during the transfer of the individual from a facility, or, with respect to an emergency medical condition..."
So somebody with a serious medial condition could be discharged, but only once that condition was treated and unlikely to further deteriorate. And then there's also a bunch of other rules hospitals that accept medicare have to follow for all patients, which are similar in spirit to EMTALA. And then there are going to state rules on top of all of this. Violations are severe with penalties able to be imposed on both the hospital and the doctors/staff involved - up to and including loss of license, and they are not covered by malpractice insurance. And the courts have invariably ruled on the side of patients, so I don't think there's any doctor that's going to be looking to try to short-serve the requirements of the law. Part of the reason you can find a million negative articles about it!
Japan has been a peaceful place throughout its demographic changes. It's not about being "awful" (inflicting maximum misery) but about effectively correcting problem behaviours. This actually requires a high degree of discipline and order among prison staff, not unlike raising children.
Life in Japanese prison is highly regimented, expectations of correct behaviour are high, and inmates are not allowed to freely interact and form a prison culture. This is in contrast to the US, where prison is effectively crime university. There are also effective post-correctional structures, eg. hiring discrimination against convicts isn't legal.
I'm arguing that Japan is a model of penal efficiency, getting a lot more bang for penal system buck, not that their system is most effective in absolute terms.
Edit: Japan spends ~14 USD per prisoner per day[1] and the US spends ~110 USD[2].
Grift is nothing new, it's existed throughout human history. See for example Herman Melville, "The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade" (1857), which is a catalogue of various kinds of grift common in that era.
If anything has changed much recently, it's that grifters have taken control of the entire system of government and economic activity - they're no longer just a pack of con artists preying on riverboat travellers, but have infiltrated all the branches of government and business and academia in the USA.
Today's most successful grifters are not isolated criminals like SBF, but rather the leading politicians and media talking heads and government bureaucrats and corporate executives who sit at the top of the American Empire - it's a nice example of the systemic institutional corruption seen at the ends of previous Empires, from the Roman to the Byzantine to the French, British and Soviet collapses, and appears to be heading towards the same conclusion.
As far as electrical fields changing things, anyone looked into any current research related to Andrew Crosse's work in 1837?
"Andrew CROSSE
Abiogenesis of Acari
Introduction:
In 1837, Andrew Crosse reported to the London electrical Society concerning the accidental spontaneous generation of life in the form of Acurus genus insects while he was conducting experiments on the formation of artificial crystals by means of prolonged exposure to weak electric current. Throughout numerous strict experiments under a wide variety of conditions utterly inimical to life as we know it, the insects continued to manifest. The great Michael Faraday also reported to the Royal Institute that he had replicated the experiment. Soon afterwards, all notice of this phenomenon ceased to be reported, and the matter has not been resolved since then.
Europe's crisis is wholly self-induced; a deliberate decision to switch off in favour of coal (Germany), or defund (France), or delay replacement of (UK) nuclear power stations in a region with cold dark winters and not the almost embarrassing excess of oil of Canada/Texas/Russia/Venezuela.
That's it. A power grid cannot be allowed to fail and no financially credible projects to store the required amount of energy (minimum, tens of TWh) exist, so renewables in such an environment have left us wholly dependent on gas. Nuclear fuel can be stockpiled, wind simply cannot, again at the required scale. If you think it can be within the next 30 years you're an idiot, a liar or a data scientist, it's that simple.
And yes, I've been to engineering conferences in EU where almost the entire topic now is "how do we minimise the damage from unreliable power". It takes zero financial acumen to realise the capital cost of the plant is not decreasing, the output is, and the best case is a reduction in output proportional to the interruption in power. That is the best case, much more frequent is a far greater loss of product. Quite a few people, myself included, were visibly on the verge of crying, because the writing is on the fucking wall. Quite honestly, the Energiewenders do not seem to give a shit, nor do they seem to about Germany's reversion to coal, a move that permanently make's Europe's position on the world stage re climate change laughable.
This is not a Russia-induced crisis - comedy shows were mocking the certainty of Putin using gas as a weapon fifteen years ago. This is entirely self-induced.
There are two types of genius. Ordinary geniuses do great things, but they leave you room to believe that you could do the same if only you worked hard enough. Then there are magicians, and you can have no idea how they do it. Feynman was a magician.
—Hans Bethe
So it's probably inspiring to hang out with magicians, but I don't know if that helps you become one.
Cameron Kyle-Sidell is a New York ICU doctor that has been trying to help figure out why treatments aren't working as expected. His videos are highly technical but interesting to watch.
Kyle-Sidell believes it's a diffusion hypoxemia problem, leading to pulmonary edema (which is something you see in high-altitude sickness)
We're all in our little alcoves of the human experience, trying the best we can to make the most of the situation we find ourselves in. For most of us, no matter how good we are at something, there are probably 100-million other people just as good as you.
The 1% rule reflects this reality: every snowflake is unique, but individual snowflakes are not special.
The 1% of people who contribute to an online community are either people who've gotten to the point that they think they have something to contribute, or they're crapflooders with nothing better to do.
Sometimes a few people (say, 1-in-10-million) rise above the ruckus and do something exceptional, or lay the groundwork for a future generation to build upon. In the last two centuries we've had a series of developments by people who laid the foundation for our species to achieve liftoff: James Clerk Maxwell, Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Nikola Tesla, Hewlett & Packard, Grace Hopper, William Shockley, and a hundred thousand remarkable/mildly-remarkable others.
Hopefully in the next few decades our species can capitalize on the foundations provided by our predecessors, and we can make it into orbit.
But most people are "average" or below average. My pseudonym started as my reports of an unremarkable person trying to make observations of average people's struggles. I grew up in a top 10% income household (parents took my sibling and myself on vacations), had a reasonable college fund (which was not well-spent), and didn't appreciate how the other 90% lived until I started driving around in my taxi.
Our present engineered shutdown of the economy for a significant percentage of the 90% of people who are no longer needed as farmers should be used as an opportunity to reconsider how things are done for the 99% of people who are just trying their best to get by.
As someone who lives in a formerly fascist country and was born in a socialist country that borrowed many fascist tools, I can tell you all one thing: Taking control of the language is a telltale sign of a fascist movement. Whoever tries to control the language automatically stands on the wrong side of history. It is not an accident that the woke movement attacks liberties so vehemently. It is also not an accident that it seems to pile one more extreme demand on top of the other, look how currently feminism gets cleansed, this is just the internal power struggle (think Röhm purge or Trotzkists). Do not make the mistake to think this movement is out there to improve anything for anyone. It is solely a revolutionary movement trying to survive and radicalize until it can get to power.
Three million New Yorkers are about to be banned from many indoor businesses and social activities, without a scientific foundation for the proposed policy.
Vaccines delivered to the arm deltoid muscle never promised mucosal immunity, even if politicians have misunderstood their purpose as more than symptom reduction.
> The mucosal immune system is the largest component of the entire immune system, having evolved to provide protection at the main sites of infectious threat: the mucosae. As SARS-CoV-2 initially infects the upper respiratory tract, its first interactions with the immune system must occur predominantly at the respiratory mucosal surfaces, during both inductive and effector phases of the response. However, almost all studies of the immune response in COVID-19 have focused exclusively on serum antibodies and systemic cell-mediated immunity including innate responses.
Since NYC was the epicenter of early Covid cases, a sizable subset of the population, especially essential workers, were infected and have long recovered with sterilizing immunity that is better than symptom-reduction from non-sterilizing vaccines. These workers (Covid Veterans?), who bore the risk of serving those sequestered at home, are now to be punished for their service? https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/558757-the-ill-advise...
> During the pandemic, the professional laptop class protected themselves by working from home while exposing the working class that brought them food and other goods. It is now the height of hypocrisy to recognize immunity from vaccinations but not immunity from those exposed while serving the laptop class.
Let's add the fact that vaccinated+infected people can transmit to others while they are free of symptoms, while the recovered have mucosal immunity that protects against both infection and transmission.
As a point of comparison, the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine provides sterilizing immunity. Hopefully, upcoming intranasal vaccines can provide a sterilizing vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. As UK SAGE stated recently,
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evoluti...
> Whilst we feel that current vaccines are excellent for reducing the risk of hospital admission and disease, we propose that research be focused on vaccines that also induce high and durable levels of mucosal immunity in order to reduce infection of and transmission from vaccinated individuals. This could also reduce the possibility of variant selection in vaccinated individuals.
> Vaccines that are injected into the arm have done a spectacular job at preventing severe disease and death. But they do not generate the kind of protection in the nasal passages that would be needed to block all infection. That’s called “sterilizing immunity.” The fact that the vaccines don’t block all infections and don’t prevent vaccinated people from transmitting isn’t a big surprise, said Kathryn Edwards, a vaccine expert at Vanderbilt School of Medicine.
In summary, NYC is going to shut out those with proven immunity and allow those who can silently (symptom-free) infect others into the small enclosed spaces of NYC restaurants. Does this sound familiar? Remember what happened last year when NY leadership sent Covid-infected patients from hospitals into nursing homes? Thousands of families of the fallen have not forgotten.
Well the good news is that now that we have mRNA vaccine technology we can develop vaccines just as fast as those viruses come.
It blows my mind that we had the coronavirus sequenced the first weekend after it was discovered, and the first current, same-as-in-production-now Moderna vaccine ready in February of last year, before the epidemic even came to the U.S. All the time since then was spent on clinical trials and ramping up manufacturing capacity.
But now that the mRNA platform up and running, I expect subsequent vaccines for new viruses can move through the process much faster, if need be.
The US HC system basically runs as a "skim" operation. Since skim is fundamentally percentage based, the more money that flows through the system, the greater the absolute amount that is skimmed. Thus, no one has incentive, in the long run, to reduce costs. Short term, insurance companies might benefit from cutting costs, but they know that ultimately, when costs go up, they can justify proportional premium increases, which increase their skim in absolute value.
I was sick in February. At the time covid tests weren't as readily available to be tested but I had many of the symptoms of covid including debilitating headaches like I've never had before. Eventually I recover and test positive for antibodies.
To this day I have issues sleeping and I'm not solely sure if it's anxiety due to pandemic or because of my presumptive case of covid.
It's gotten slightly better in recent weeks but for months now I'd wake up about 30 minutes after falling asleep with a pounding heart and and feeling of extreme anxiety. Not as bad as a panic attack but still not pleasant.
Yeah, my SO is a nurse in paediatric oncology and has seen people from poorer countries sell everything they have in order to bring their child to Western hospitals in the futile hope of treatment.
It's really sad and seems almost exploitative. They often get ripped off by private clinics in their home countries as well.
At some point we need to say these people aren't in a fit state of mind to make these financial decisions. (Who would be? When the life of their own child seems to be at stake?)
Being a patent lawyer, I had to dig a little deeper because there is a record behind every patent.
As you some of you already know, the patent office does not freely give patents for impossible devices. No perpetual motion machines, no magic invisibility cloaks, nothing that an ordinary person in the relevant art could not build after reading the patent. This is a doctrine called “enablement”—the patent, plus what is already known in the art, must be enough to enable one to build a working device without undue experimentation. This is the quid pro quo of the patent system: to get ownership of the invention for 20 years, you must tell everyone enough about it to build it themselves.
This patent almost suffered the fate of non-enablement at the patent office. What led to its issuance is the interesting part because patent examiner tried and tried to reject this patent as not “enabling” the invention. Yet it issued anyways.
I cannot link directly to the patent prosecution documents, but the files are public and you can find them at the USPTO database[0] by searching for the patent's application number 15/141,270.
The patent was filed in April 2016. The first action by the USPTO was in November 2017 with the usual delay and it rejected all claims as not enabling the invention. Simply put the examiner said: “You’re claiming a perpetual motion machine, good-bye.”
The patent examiner and the applicant held an interview in January 2018, which is an ordinary event to try to convince the examiner is wrong. The examiner pointed out “that he still felt there were enablement issues.” The applicant disagreed. No agreement was reached.
A few days later, the applicant filed his formal response to the rejection. He attached a published article under his authorship in AIAA Space Forum[1]. He also cited other publications on how to “generate extremely high EM flux intensities.” Basically, he's saying I'm peer-reviewed here is some other peer-reviewed articles, and it being peer-reviewed that's all you need to know.
But most interestingly, he attached a letter from Dr. James Sheehy, Chief Technical Officer of the Naval Systems Air Command, indicating that the amount of magnetic field and electricity described as being required by the patent “can be created, and thus the invention is enabled.” Dr. James Sheehy is a real dude, with that real title and corresponding resume.[2]
Dr. Sheehy’s letter is fascinating. It asserts that the applicant is currently one year into a project to demonstrate the feasibility of high EM field-energy and flux and has begun experimenting with associated propulsion systems. Dr. Sheehy says he believes the research shows the invention will be a reality. Then he says (seriously, he says) “China is already investing significantly in this area and I would prefer we hold the patent opposed to paying forever more to use this revolutionary technology.”
The examiner at the patent office (who is typically kind of knowledgeable in the field) nevertheless called B.S. Peer-reviewed, shmear-reviewed. He rejected the application again finally in March 2018. He pointed out "for a high energy electromagnetic field to polarize a quantum vacuum as claimed it would take 10^9 teslas and 10^18 V/m." He said "these levels are not feasible with current technology so how would someone of ordinary skill be able to know how to create this craft? The largest magnetic field ever created is 10^3 teslas and a neutron star is 10^ teslas so how are you using a microwave emitter that produces a magnetic field that is three orders of magnitude greater than a neutron star?" And so on... Basically, the examiner said this is bullshit.
As is often done in this situation, the applicant filed an appeal from the patent examiner’s rejection. This is usually a procedure that is next addressed by a board of patent judges, with more briefing, typically oral argument, and takes months to years. But the appeal was never picked up after it was lodged, and it is unclear why. Two months after the appeal was filed, on October 31, 2018, the examiner (for no reason apparent in the file) allowed the patent to issue without comment and on the same day the government paid the fees it owed. The patent was issued in due course.
Whether or not the named inventor was a crank, and whether or not the invention was equally frivolous, this was a patent prosecuted by a Navy attorney, vouched for by the Navy CTO, and pushed through under atypical circumstances, in a public forum.
What's even more intriguing is that, if the Navy wanted, it could obtain the patent under a secrecy order that would keep it from the public's eyes until it was declassified.
Knowing all this, now ask yourself why this impossible sounding patent issued in a public forum with high-level brass support under tax payer dollars.
The red light on subs is there to make it easier on your eyes to adjust to the dark and help with your night vision for looking through the periscope at night.
The reason is your night vision relies on rhodopsin, a compound very sensitive to light but not red light. So red light will give you night vision using the cone cells instead of consuming the rhodopsin in the rods of your retina.
Talking about environment, I saw a very good quote by a woman named Tine Brubak Jahren, that I have taken the
liberty to translate to English:
"It's odd when it comes to sympathy for drug addicts: Everyone has much sympathy for sexually abused children, children of drug addicts, victims of violence and abuse, people with mental health issues that are not helped by the system. BUT, when they grow up to become dysfunctional adults that use drugs to take away the pain and their problems, then it is suddenly full stop for the sympathy.
Suddenly, they are expected to take charge of their lives and behave like everyone else, and if they can't do that, there is no lack of suggestions such as sending them to desolate islands, forced sterilization or simply locking them up for life."
She makes a great point, that also highlights the absurdity of using fines and prison for addicts. The system essentially punishes them for something the system has predisposed them to.
Native New Mexican here. Rainwater collection is more nuanced than this article suggests. Water that runs off a roof of a building isn't "wasted." It typically drains into an aquifer or a river. This is well-known in Tucson, a city that pumped so much groundwater that the Santa Cruz river dried up decades ago. [1]
There are also legal ramifications. In New Mexico, it's not clear whether rainwater collection is legal. [2] The water falling on your property could be somebody else's water under the doctrine of prior appropriation.
I'm going to go and replace 3 years with a "short time frame". Some things to focus on:
- Market opportunity- a million dollars isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it certainly is a lot if the market opportunity is not large enough. Even if you put Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as founders in a new venture with a total market size of 10 million, there is no way they could become too wealthy without completely changing the business (ie- failing).
- Inequality of information- find a place where you know something that many undervalue. Having this inequality of information can give you, your first piece of leverage.
- Leverage skills you know- You can go into new fields such as say Finance, but make sure you're leveraging something you already know such as technology and/or product. Someone wanted to start a documentary with me. I said that would be fun, but it would be my first documentary regardless of what happened. There was a glass ceiling due to that. If I do something leveraging a skill I know, I'm already ahead of the game.
- Look in obscure places- We're often fascinated with the shiny things in the internet industry. Many overlook the obscure and unsexy. Don't make that mistake. If your goal has primarily monetary motivations, look at the unsexy.
- Surround yourself with smart people- smart people whom are successful usually got there by doing the same and have an innate desire to help those do the same. it's the ecosystem that's currently happening with the paypal mafia and can be traced all the way back to fairchild semiconductor.
- Charge for something- Building a consumer property dependent upon advertising has easily made many millionaires, but it isn't the surest path. It takes a lot of time and scale, which due to cashflow issues will require large outside investment probably before you are a millionaire. Build something that you can charge for.
- Your metric shouldn't be dollars- If you're going after a big enough market and charging a reasonable amount, you can hit a million dollars. Focus on growth, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value of the customer, and churn.
- Get as many distribution channels as possible- There is some weird sense that if you build something they will just come. That a few like buttons and emails to editor@techcrunch.com will make your traffic explode + grow consistently. It fucking won't. Get as many distribution channels as possible. Each one by itself may not be large, but if you have many it starts to add up. It also diversifies your risk. If you're a 100% SEO play, you're playing a dangerous dangerous game. You're fully dependent upon someone else's rules. If Google bans you, you will be done. Replace SEO with: App store, facebook, etc.
- Go with your gut and do not care about fameballing- Go with what your gut says, regardless of how it might look to the rest of the world. Too often we (I) get lost in caring about what people think. It usually leads to a wrong decision. Don't worry about becoming internet famous or appearing on teh maj0r blogz. Fame is fleeting in the traditional sense. Become famous with your customers. They're the ones that truly matter. What they think matters and they will ultimately put their money where their mouth is.
- Be an unrelenting machine- Brick walls are there to show you how bad you want something. Commit to your goals and do not waver from them a one bit regardless of what else is there. I took this approach to losing weight and fitness. I have not missed a single 5k run in over a year. It did not matter if I had not slept for two days, traveling across the country, or whatever else. If your goals is to become a millionaire, you need to be an unrelenting machine that does not let emotions make you give up / stop. You either get it done with 100% commitment or you don't. Be a machine.
- If it's a "trend", it's too late- This means the barriers to entry are usually too high at this point to have the greatest possible chance of success. Sure you could still make a lot of money in something like the app store or the facebook platform, but the chances are significantly less than they were in the summer of 08 or spring of 2007. You can always revisit past trends though.
- If you do focus on a dollar amount, focus on the first $10,000- This usually means you've found some repeatable process / minimal traction. ie- if you're selling a $100 product, you've already encountered 100 people who have paid you. From here you can scale up. It's also a lot easier to take in when you're looking at numbers. Making 1 million seems hard, but making $10,000 doesn't seem so hard, right?
- Be a master of information- Many think it might be wasteful that I spent so much time on newsyc or read so many tech information sites. It's not, it's what gives me an edge. I feel engulfed.
- Get out and be social- Even if you're an introvert, being around people will give you energy. I'm at my worst when I'm isolated from people and at my best when I've at least spent some time with close friends (usually who I don't know from business.)
- Make waves, don't ride them- There was a famous talk Jawed Karim gave from youtube. He described the three factors that made youtube take off. I think they included (1- emergence of flash, so no codecs required 2- one click upload 3- ability to share embed). Find those small pieces and put them together to make the wave. That's what youtube did imho. The other guys really just rode the wave they created (which is okay).
- Say no way more than you say yes- I bet almost every web entrepreneur has encountered this: You demo your product / explain what you're doing and someone suggests that you do "X feature/idea". X is a really good idea and maybe even fits in with what you're doing, but it would take you SO FAR off the path you're on. If you implemented X it would take a ton of time and morph what you're doing. It's also really really hard to say no when it comes from someone well respected like a VC or famous entrepreneur. I mean how the fuck could they be wrong? Hell, they might even write me a check if I do what they say!!!!! Don't fall for that trap. Instead write the feedback down somewhere as one single data point to consider amongst others. If that same piece of feedback keeps coming up AND it fits within the guidelines of your vision, then you should consider it more seriously. Weight suggestions from paying customers a bit more, since their vote is weighted by dollars.
- Be so good they can't ignore you- I first heard this quote from Marc Andreessen, but he stole it from Steve Martin. Just be so good with what you do that you can't be ignored. You can surely get away with a boring product with no soul, but being so good you can't ignore is much more powerful.
- Always keep your door/inbox open- You never know who is going to walk through your door + contact you. Serendipity is a beautiful thing. At one point Bill Gates was just a random college kid calling an Albuquerque computer company.
- Give yourself every opportunity you can- I use this as a reason why starting a company in silicon valley when it comes to tech is a good idea. You can succeed anywhere in the world, but you certainly have a better chance in the valley. You should give yourself every opportunity possible, especially as an entrepreneur where every advantage counts.
- Give yourself credit- This is the thing I do the least of and I'm trying to work on it. What may seem simple+not that revolutionary to anyone ahead of the curve can usually be pure wizardry to the general public, whom is often your customer. Give yourself more credit.
- Look for the accessory ecosystem- iPod/iPhone/iPad case manufacturers are making a fortune. Armormount is also making a killing by making flat panel wall mounts. Woothemes makes millions of dollars a year (and growing) selling Wordpress themes. There are tons of other areas here, but these are the ones that come to mind first. If there's a huge new product/shift, there's usually money to be made in the accessory ecosystem.
- Stick with it- Don't give up too fast. Being broke and not making any money sucks + can often make you think nothing will ever work. Don't quit when you're down. If this was easy then everyone would be a millionaire and being a millionaire wouldn't be anything special. Certainly learn from your mistakes + pivot, but don't quit just because it didn't work right away.
- Make the illiquid, liquid- I realized this after talking to a friend who helps trade illiquid real estate securities. A bank may have hundreds of millions of assets, but they're actually worth substantially less if they cannot be moved. If you can help people make something that is illiquid, liquid they will pay you a great deal of money. Giving you a 20-30% cut is worth it, when the opposite is making no money at all.
- Productize a service- If you can make what might normally be considered a service into a scaleable, repeatable, and efficient process that makes it seem like a product you can make a good amount of money. In some ways, I feel this is what Michael Dell did with DELL in the early days. Putting together a computer is essentially a service, but he put together a streamlined method of doing things that it really turned it into a product. On a much smaller scale, PSD2XHTML services did this. It's a service, but the end result + what you pay for really feels like a product.
Moderators and a small number of reviewer users comb the depths of /newest looking for stories that got overlooked but which the community might find interesting. Those go into a second-chance pool from which stories are randomly selected and lobbed onto the bottom part of the front page. This guarantees them a few minutes of attention. If they don't interest the community they soon fall off, but if they do, they get upvoted and stay on the front page.
We want to turn this system into something that's open to all users who want to take time to review stories. We'll make it a form of community service that will be a new way to earn karma. However, it's still an open question how to pull this off without simply recreating the current upvoting system under another guise.
There's one glitch that occasionally confuses people. When the software lobs a story, it displays a rolled-back timestamp—not the original submission time, but a resubmission time relative to other items on the front page. If you see a timestamp inconsistency on HN, this is probably why. Edit: if this is the kind of detail that interests you, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774614 for a more recent explanation.
Sure.
Let's look at some of the major pieces of furniture people have:
Tables, cabinets, chairs.
It's the same story with all of them.
Let's start with cabinets. A bit of cheating since most people don't consider it furniture, but worth talking about.
Most people want white or colored cabinets. The "natural wood" look is mostly out of style these days, due to mass over-production of red-oak cabinets (and thank god. they made them because red oak was the cheapest most available hardwood in the us for many many years)
Where it isn't, they want something that "looks" like cherry (or what they think cherry looks like), or mahogany but isn't.
People are more than happy to buy cabinets with thin veneers or laminated whatever on them. They have no concept of construction quality, etc. They don't care. People who do care are willing to pay, but even then, don't know what they are paying for.
Given that, what precisely supports the price differential of making "really good" for people who don't care and aren't willing to pay for it?
The answer is "nothing" :)
Thus, it's not cost effective to make cabinets out cherry, when coloring poplar reddish will do.
It's also usually not cost effective to use real wood for anything that is going to be topcoated a solid color.
But again, you have this issue that there is a high-end, and a low-end, and the middle end doesn't exist, really, it's just low-end stuff sold at a higher price. Because they can.
It's pretty much all mass produced, BTW.
Note: The last part to be automated is finishing, and as the cost of flat-line finishing machines comes down from 100k to 10k, the number of shops buying them goes up, as happened with regular CNC.
But even in finishes, people can't tell what they are paying for. In an ideal world, you want your cabinets done with a nice 2k post-catalyzed conversion varnish (US) or 2k urethane (europe). Or uv-cured stuff that is equivalent. They will be very highly scratch resistant, highly moisture and chemical resistant, etc.
Can a consumer tell? No. They will look identical at the start. Unless you rubbed acetone on them, you are unlikely to be able to tell if the finish is a post-cat or not from the finished product. You would have to place 3-4 years wear and tear on them, and see how scratched and stained they look.
So instead, a ton of non-factory cabinet makers still use pretty crappy finishes (pre-cat lacquers, etc) because they are cheap and fast. 2k stuff requires accurate mixing and has a pot-life. Good folks these days use cyclomix or equivalent, or uv cure, or something, to make up for this. But the main sales point is lack of callbacks, which is hard to quantify. This kind of quality is hard to sell. Nobody (well, not enough people) really look at their cabinets n years later and says "hey, i bet that guy didn't do a great finishing job", instead they say "gee, i guess i'm hard on cabinets".
Interestingly, plenty of commercial work will call you on this kind of thing happening. But consumers just suck it up.
That's cabinets. Let's say that's a special case for a second.
Tables.
Well, okay, so to start, people do buy mass produced really-good stuff already. IIRC, most of the furniture restoration hardware sells is mass-produced.
I've also seen really well-made mass-produced stuff at crate and barrel before (in fact, in one case, better than i could make it by far, and i've been woodworking for 20+ years)
But most people are not willing to pay for this stuff, and those who do, are willing to buy cheaply made stuff for higher prices.
Top is solid wood, pretty simple and machined construction.
You could produce it really cheaply with machines (and i'm sure they do)
But people are willing to pay 1499, and if i make the same thing, with a veneer top and same glued-on live edge (IE not "really-good"), and sell it for half price, people will buy it.
So why would i make it "really good" for 799 when i can make it "really crappy" for 799 and people buy it?
and that's precisely what happens!
Chairs are the same.
In general, people care what things look like, not how they are made or what they are made of.
So most people aren't willing to pay for quality, even if you tried to educate them about what it looked like (if you have to educate your market that you are better, you are probably going to lose)
This makes it not cost-effective to try to optimize for quality.
Somebody will just out-sell you and out-profit you by making it crappily and selling it for 80% of the same price.
This is in fact, the history of the world here. The good stuff either got pushed to the high end, or out-sold/out-stripped by people making crappy stuff and selling it at the middle end, and then making super-crappy stuff and selling it at the low-end.
In any of these markets, there isn't room in the market for this linear-curve of quality vs pricing. If quality vs price was a 10 point scale, it'd look like this right now:
quality: 1-3
price: 1-6
quality: 4-9
price: 7-8
quality: 10
price: 9-10
As a result, quality 4-9 doesn't get done much, and it makes no sense to make quality 10 furniture and sell it at price 2.
> Other software RAID solutions like Linux MDADM lets you grow an existing RAID array with one disk at a time.
His issue isn't with ZFS, it's that most parity raid (raidz, raidz2, raid5, raid6, etc) doesn't support safely rebalancing an array to a different number of disks.
With mirrors, the things he describes aren't an issue, especially in a home server. You can start with one disk, mirror it when you're ready; then add additional vdevs of mirrored pairs extending your pool as necessary. Or upgrade two disks to grow a vdev.
Some gets to where it needs to be, the rest gunks up the engine on the outside and in places it shouldn't be.
Almost any drug acting on 5HT (fk acts on 2C), acts on other receptors as well. Fk acts on α1, M1-4, and many more, it's not very selective. A venerable bucket of oil, indeed. This is, what also causes Long-QT, feeding disorders, diarrhea, shorter pregnancies, dry mouth, sexual dysfunction, and more.
Sure, dropping such a bucket of oil can also, via inflammatory pathways, elicit IL-10 activation and, more importantly, act against hypertriglyceridemia. But that should not be sold as a solution to a problem. Again, to stay with contrived comparisons, if I load the boot of a car with C4, I am sure that some parts of the car will reach more than the car's stated maximum speed. But that's not a desirabe outcome.
As a last ditch, I'd consider it. But "preventatively" as suggested... that's a far, far, reach.