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Of course, human achievement is full of Pareto distributions.

Same with mating - a small percentage of say 10% of men mate with half the women or so. Throughout history you have twice as many female ancestors as Male ancestors. Success accumulates at the top.


The mating thing is no longer true. Unless you define it as offspring, but those are hardly successful men in financial terms. If you define it as dating or sex it's true. But most men marry - a relatively recent thing in human society.


Psychiatry is not a science. And their business model literally depends on you not getting better. Those $200/hr sessions aren't big business unless you keep coming back for more.

While we're at it, let's prescribe some pills for underlying deficiencies we can't measure in the first place.


I don't think your first point very well thought out.

Any doctor (or mechanic, accountant, etc...) could benefit by providing false/sub-standard services to keep the client returning regularly.

As for the measurement, it's almost entirely based on feedback from the patient.

I can see how a depressed or mentally ill person could be more susceptible to accepting medication that wasn't in their best interest, but that problem seems intrinsic to all medication.


Wrong. Doctors would (hopefully) lose licenses and have big legal consequences. Mechanics are also subject to some form of objective measurement as even the average driver has some sense if a problem is being fixed or not.

But psychiatry? Forget it. You pay to talk to someone, they have a nice couch, soothing voice, make you feel good for an hour, but nothing really changes. But hey, I liked that hour, I should keep coming back!


Probably some poor engineers trying to check if their partners were cheating on them. Tools like FB make it easier after all.


Honestly men probably shouldn't be put in a position to be able to tamper with things like this. The evolutionary advantageous temptation is too great.

Similarly, to solve a related problem, we should require mandatory paternity testing at birth so men don't unwittingly raise someone else's child.


"Science" has real problems. We can't even discuss controversial viewpoints, such as case-specific dangers with vaccines (yes, they are real, and the CDC covered up data) and climate skepticism (does lowering CO2 really do anything meaningful, vs. the fact that we're coming out of an ice age from 10K+ years ago).

But it's impossible to have an evidence-backed rational conversation about these topics with scientists, let alone the general public.


Isn't this the guy who wants to dissolve the border between Texas and Mexico? Jesus.

Here's the difference borders make: check out Nogales Mexico vs. Nogales Arizona -

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/travel/nogales-arizona-me...

It's not race or genetics or even culture. It's the institutions separated by country borders that let almost otherwise identical cities have radically different outcomes.


Hey, I may have missed something -- do you have a cite for the claim that he wants to dissolve the border?



That's to be a video of Beto arguing that walls should be torn down. I'm asking about this claim that he wants to dissolve borders.


I just need one person to explain to me: why should Amazon get better tax breaks and deals than the existing local businesses?

Someone just tell me.


"Incredibly, I have heard city and state elected officials who were opponents of the project claim that Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation. This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental ignorance of basic math by a group of elected officials. The city and state 'gave' Amazon nothing. Amazon was to build their headquarters with union jobs and pay the city and state $27 billion in revenues. The city, through existing as-of-right tax credits, and the state through Excelsior Tax credits - a program approved by the same legislators railing against it - would provide up to $3 billion in tax relief, IF Amazon created the 25,000-40,000 jobs and thus generated $27 billion in revenue. You don't need to be the State's Budget Director to know that a nine to one return on your investment is a winner."


Sorry, but this is just spin.

Of course the city was giving them something - that's what the $3b in "tax relief" was about.


Things get better with scale. If an existing local business could create 25-40,000 new jobs and generate $27 billion in new tax revenue, they'd also be able to get a $3 billion dollar tax break.


Ah, so you like winner-take-all economics where those who are already winning have it easier to keep winning.

Gotcha.


The tax incentives in the Amazon deal were almost entirely general incentives available to any company that invested in building or expanding in that location.


Quantity discount.

For example, if you buy 10 cars from a dealer you're going to get a better per-car deal than if you buy 1.


Amazing actually.

I got laid way more being a broke entrepreneur (or the best: being in massive debt) than when I was a wage slave.

Anything that boosts your "aliveness", like being on the edge of survival and success, controlling your own destiny, etc, makes you more attractive to women. Women love novelty, let me tell you. They also love leaders, and potential.


Wow, just about everything in this comment is ridiculously demeaning.


Nothing like this can exist without some money for the owners to maintain and create it. Nothing's free. Why can't people understand this?


OP didn't say it had to be free. You could also have a social network that just displayed ads without any kind of targeting and user-tracking whatsoever.


... it's just that in the marketplace of ad channels for advertisers to invest their budget in, that network loses out to networks with targeted ads.


Who's to say that if the general public were presented with two free (to the user) social networks, one that targets ads and one that doesn't, that people would opt to use the targeted one over the non-targeted one?


My snarky answer is "Google vs. DDG's usage numbers," but a more serious answer is that yes, that'd be a possibility (but I'd sadly put it on the low end of probable outcomes given what we know about both the stickiness of existing social networks vs. newcomers and how much concern for privacy users actually tend to demonstrate).


Fair! :)


Available evidence suggests that enough people want to be on whatever the biggest platform is for that to give it a decisive advantage over the competition.


If you look smart and inventive you appear higher social status. Helps nerds impress women I reckon.


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