I think swiley is being a bit cheeky by applying the term "high" to those who are officially, medically stimulated. But you may be erring on the other side, giving too much weight to the official narrative that blesses "medical" speed and condemns "street" speed.
The real difference between medical and rec speed is dosage and route of administration. Big doses, taken nasally or intravenously, are abuse; small doses, taken orally, are medication.
But to concur with swiley, speed doesn't magically stop being speed when an ADHD diagnosis and a Trademarked Drug (TM) enter the picture.
While I understand the instinct, there is a flip side. A while back Lutz Prechelt posed the phonecode problem, inviting solutions in multiple languages. While he didn't specify error handling, the Perl solutions were on average better at error handling than the compiled language solutions.
Look at the flip side - if a big chunk of people go for those memes, it takes pressure off the price of houses. I would love for houses to become unfashionable. Then I could buy more house for less dollars.
First, this idealistic idea that "we" are going to take back our data. Who is this we? Only the smart, high-agency people who have time to spare. The commercial web is increasingly tuned to the normal user, who is low-agency and easily led around. Who will win a battle of user acquisition and retention? Facebook or the rebels? Facebook of course. So any solutions proposed here are just for a tiny percentage of users who will then be isolated from the real and useful social networks. Or more realistically use both.
Or maybe if the infrastructure is built, a layer of savvy entrepreneurs can emerge to monetize it? I'm thinking of reaganemail, selling an anti-google email account to the AM radio crowd.
Second, the idea of somehow eliminating censorship. De facto censorship will always exist, even if you sugar coat it as Twitter has tried - "your content is still there, but only if someone explicitly looks for it". Any platform without censorship will just be flooded by every marketer and political zealot, for starters.
Also, I think he is conflating filter bubbles with centralization. Without centralization, wouldn't we still have filter bubbles as people self-select into their online communities?
> The real reason you don't see streetcars is that the benefits of a public transit system are externalities[2], and so they must be funded by the government.
I don't follow your logic here. Seems like two different issues. First, should transit be subsidized based on positive externalities. Second, which technology will best deliver that transit. Are these issues coupled somehow? I think they are independent.
In the US, we often have government-operated buses that are heavily subsidized. If streetcars were a better option, the transportation authority could use them.Whether subsidized or not, whether public or private, you presumably have a decision maker looking to deliver transit of a certain grade at the lowest cost.
So if all the historical rails and overhead wires were still intact, I'm guessing that today's transit authorities would make the same decision as the transit companies did back in the day, which is switch over to motor buses and either dismantle or neglect the expensive infrastructure.
Of course there would be a few exceptions; very heavily used routes, and places where non-economic reasons would intervene.
Now the wikipedia page you linked presents a much more nuanced view than what you advocated. In fact it contains a lot to support my skepticism, particularly under "Other Factors" and "Counterarguments". For instance:
> "GM Killed the Red cars in Los Angeles".[84] Pacific Electric Railway (which operated the 'red cars') was hemorrhaging routes as traffic congestion worsened with growing car ownership levels after the end of World War II.[88]
And most tellingly:
> GM's alleged conspiracy extended to only about 10% of American transit systems
So the other 90% shut down the street car lines without any arm twisting from GM. Sounds like all system operators saw the same economic picture.
I'm not wedded to my theory (change driven by evolving technology) but I'm even more skeptical of your theory (change driven by conspiracy).
~
I've heard that story plenty of times, but I have my doubts, which increase over time. I think people simply didn't like streetcars once buses were available. I think streetcars were seen as a horrible, dangerous, inconvenient technology with massive infrastructure costs.
The first crack in my belief was a comment by a former Baltimore fire chief (I think) who had worked as a streetcar and bus driver earlier. He talked about how scary it was to operate a streetcar with its very poor braking, and how during the transition period every operator was jumping at the chance to become a bus driver.
I'm sure there's a grain of truth in there, about lobbying - but was it really the decisive factor? Could Amazon lobby and get Ebay shut down? Did landline phones fade away because of lobbying from the cellular industry?
Streetcars were a very cool idea but unfortunately motor buses were better in every objective way.
Many intelligent comments in this thread; let me point out the underacknowledged.
You are limited by who you are. By your appearance, mannerisms, speech patterns. Your clothing, body language, grooming and hygiene. Your ingrained habits of action, speech and thought. Your age - foolish excitable youth or cramped, ossified old age. Your network and resume. Some of this can be improved, some can't.
It all sets an upper bound on your potential, but you could fall far short of this due to bad luck or bad execution. Almost nobody will be honest with you about any of this. Which means savvy observers may see your limits very quickly, but will not tell you.
Trust is a huge factor, and again, people will not be up front about this. A solo startup has a huge legitimacy gap if selling to big companies. You could just vanish, go on vacation, get sick, steal the company's data, sue the company claiming to be a de facto employee.
So acquire signals of legitimacy aggressively. Sell anything to a big corporation or government agency, no matter how small and out of your specialty, and you have a bragging point. Join industry associations. Get an advisory board with the right resumes. (All this assumes b2b).
If you are not likeable, you will have great difficulty selling. That includes pitching to investors, attracting co-founders, employees and beta testers.
Every time you have contact with a salesman - that includes missionaries, military recruiters, etc. - note down what they did that worked and didn't work. The common denominator I've seen in the good salesman is 1) being likeable and 2) understanding my particular situation.
If you see any way to get objective feedback on you, not the company - do it. For instance, bring a savvy observer on a sales call. He can be an investor, a salesman from one of your suppliers, or a paid advisor. I personally stumbled into that situation and benefited from it.
Maybe I'm overstating this because plenty of seemingly dislikeable people started successful companies.
I've worked blue collar jobs where bosses are way more direct, like your Russian managers - and it's better. I remember one who would tell me most mornings, "Try not to fuck up today!" When a boss is angry and direct in giving feedback, we don't become resentful; we get scared for a while, then settle down. It's the natural way of hierarchy. We all need course correction from time to time, and the modern white-collar way sucks.
This guy's bad feelings were increased by his isolation. Compare this to an old school environment where you got yelled at by the boss, then emerged from the office to the jokes of your co-workers who heard the yelling through the door. That's a more natural environment.
(The old school boss sometimes fucked up by abusing an employee in front of co-workers. It should always be done behind closed doors.)
However in many years of corporate work I can rarely figure out what my bosses actually want or what they're thinking. They talk about corporate initiatives and get that uncomfortable "lying" body language, probably because they don't really believe this stuff but have to parrot it.
Getting back to your Russian managers - I think we are wired for hierarchy but we need certain signals to be comfortable with it. We like to work for bosses who are comfortable wielding power. When the boss projects too much weakness, the power relationship becomes very uncomfortable. I'm guessing that the remote bosses in the story didn't give strong course correction early on because they felt uncomfortable. They let the situation escalate, then took this drastic action.
While I don't have a good grasp on the larger issue, I hope we can protect small players from being squeezed. In my limited understanding, there are really two separate things here: Comcast vs Youtube and Comcast vs startup. As I understand it, Comcast gets mad that they have to invest in infrastructure so people can watch Youtube. They think Youtube is free-riding on their infrastructure. Comcast is envious of Youtube's profits and eyeballs. So Comcast wants to squeeze money out of Youtube. A battle between giants.
The other issue is that small sites including startups could get throttled almost incidentally in this war. They don't use much bandwidth, being small, but if Comcast enacts some "bizdev" process where it takes six months of negotiations to get into the fast lane, any deal below $1M is probably not worth their time.
This is how cell phone software worked before the iPhone - get permission before you can develop (IIRC). If we end up with fast-lane preferential pricing, it should really be available to the smallest players. Ideally it should be free, but the Apple app store model would work - $99/year for fast lane access until your bandwidth is really significant. But would the individual have to pay $99 to every major ISP out there?
Seems to be a subset of libraries and frameworks in general. They are not up front with the limitations of their software, so you have to invest a lot of hours finding them.
There's no absolute answer to the "build vs buy" conundrum. A lot of us are biased towards "build" and its useful to recognize that bias in our decision making. But the "buy" side often has hidden costs. In the author's case, which involves targeting multiple platforms, the "buy" side gets more attractive. In general you are deciding whether to code on platform X or on platform Y built on top of X.
Fashions come and go, and if you invest heavily on top of Y it may become "obsolete". Will you be willing to stay on Y when the developer/community has abandoned it? You may have to reinvest to port onto Y', while X remained somewhat stable.
The higher level the platform, the more likely you are to hit surprising limitations late in the process. Your role gradually transitions from technology producer to technology consumer.
Programming an AVR chip in C gives you a great feeling of space and power because the platform is so clean, while using Arduino you rapidly hit limitations and spend your time getting around them. Higher level platforms tend to make the easy things easier and the hard things very hard.
I wouldn't rule out the subjective factors. For many of us building is more fun than sorting through what others have built. The brain works a lot better when having fun, which is why MBA-style decisions about programming don't always work.
However Carnegie doesn't advocate self-disclosure. Quite the opposite - he advises shutting up about yourself (and your organization, product, etc.) and listening to the other person.
On the topic of scary chemical plants: check out the Chemical Safety Board's videos on Youtube. Mostly computer-animated recreations of serious industrial accidents.
This comment seems to have touched a nerve; it's voted way down.
Can anyone rebut Shivetya's claims?
1. Subway is the most expensive transportation option per passenger mile, when you include subsidies.
2. Only one other US city (besides NYC) has 10% of workers riding the subway. (If I'm reading that right - is heavy transit distinct from "light rail" here?)
If you can't rebut them, what good is voting them down?
The real difference between medical and rec speed is dosage and route of administration. Big doses, taken nasally or intravenously, are abuse; small doses, taken orally, are medication.
But to concur with swiley, speed doesn't magically stop being speed when an ADHD diagnosis and a Trademarked Drug (TM) enter the picture.