nevertheless most people can be a lot better at most things than they are, in the same amount of time, if the education and culture around education is of higher quality.
The real issue is that if you do manage to build a cheaper clone they can just delete you by lowering their prices. It'll hurt the growth they have to show investors but not as much as letting you live will.
>The real issue is that if you do manage to build a cheaper clone they can just delete you by lowering their prices.
Yep, this is why cost leadership strategies tend to be unattractive to startups. Finding ways to be meticulously frugal just isn't exciting to most people, I would think.
Well my point is that it's not a question of how exciting it is. It is that it is essentially unworkable as a business strategy, unless you have a technique for being more frugal or efficient than it is possible for your competitor to be. And they have scale on their side, so it is doubtful.
(that said I'm just an engineer parroting things I heard while working there, I wasn't involved in any actual strategy)
It's a bad market to take on because the competition is 'commodification by Google/Apple/Microsoft'. If you do a great job you compete with Dropbox on price and quality, and if you do anything short of that you compete with the office suite versions of the same product, which are effectively free to their subscribers (because file sync is packaged with other services that they're buying anyway) so getting people to give you money is very hard. Dropbox itself is perpetually at risk of being commodified out of existence; their constant battle is finding ways to make sure their customers can still justify paying for them as a separate service.
(at least this was the ambient understanding internally when I worked there a few years ago)
The value proposition of Dropbox is exactly that it is an independent service, in my view (in addition to having best-in-class desktop integration). Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t compete with that almost by definition.
While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.
For an individual sure, but the vast majority of their business is corporate contracts which don't think that way.
Generally it is impossible to understand Dropbox's strategy if you think about individual purchasers as significant. Iirc they mostly serve as a marketing funnel for team- and business-sized contracts. (although this varies from year to year, sometimes they do focus on e.g. family plans for revenue)
Yeah, I understand that Dropbox isn’t thinking how I think. My argument is that even if they lose these corporate contracts, it should still be a viable (if much smaller) business to serve those users that do care. In other words, it wouldn’t force Dropbox to entirely stop existing.
Hmm, tend to disagree, but this is just an educated guess of mine. Seems like business have more specific needs that individuals, and would guess that Dropbox has many small features targeted for just companies (richer api's, more stability, more customization). Yeah, at least in my opinion, the larger the business, the more features they need.
Well they do. The problem is that if a competitor arises on the individual market they can pretty efficiently copy anything that makes them competitive.
fwiw I really believe it is, my sleep problems come and go based on entirely physical variables--how flexible I feel, how much time I spent "shrimping", how tight my back and neck are.
Personally I would not be surprised at all if in 50-100 years we look back on this era as one where we massively overprescribed CPAP machines to treat an entirely-fixable condition in most people (alongside all the other medical interventions that will turn out to be bandaid fixes for actually fixable problems). I'm aware this is a bit of an outlandish take. But you can tell how many people's breathing and posture is bad just by existing in the world for ten minutes and looking at them. I think it's really an epidemic.
I don’t think it’s an outlandish take at all. You can possibly also put orthotics and spectacles in the list of interventions as solutions to problems largely induced by unnatural adaptations to an unnatural environment.
yeah... mostly I said it that way because this take upsets some people. The full list (which I think are 80+% fixable by lifestyle) is something like: sleep apnea, obesity, back pain, most things that require physical therapy outside of injuries, probably orthotics and myopia, depression, ADHD, anxiety... probably there are others I'm not thinking of also.
I would like to also include cancers since we cause most of them but that is maybe a different category. Although I have heard of theories that suggest diet can reduce skin cancer (e.g. the mediterranean diet phenomenon) as well as one that suggests exercise can reduce prostate cancer (by strengthening the muscles surrounding veins to prevent testosterone from leaking into the prostate), and of course smoking-related cancers are entirely preventable, so I would not be surprised if there are a lot more that are prevented by health lifestyles.
Generally it doesn't seem to work to just tell people to be healthy, though; to really get any of this work you need society at large to be structured in a healthy way so that it becomes the default instead of an act of willpower. But that seems.. imminently doable, if people want to do it. However it's a huge change, so it takes a movement. For example you pretty much have to make people's lifestyles more walking-oriented, which means rearranging society completely.
Which physical therapies are "interventions as solutions to problems largely induced by unnatural adaptations to an unnatural environment"?
As a math and physics expert, you also claim to be proficient at body movement. Go off king, I'll wait. And AHDH huh? Cancer, uhuh. You're a pyschoholigist and doctor too.
Like: for example, it seems fairly obvious that some societal-level change happened around the 70s or 80s that triggered our modern obesity epidemics. My personal best guess is that it was the rise of processed foods messing up people's gut bacteria, but I have no actual idea. Nonetheless: you can spend as much time and energy (as a society) as you want curing obesity, but if ultimately the cause is in our food quality, then the "right" fix is obviously to fix that. The same claim applies to skin cancer and dietary connections: if the Mediterranean diet or general food quality is responsible for lower incidence of cancers in those places, then ... food quality should be fixed, right? (and sun exposure, of course, is another variable that you can just do things about).
You don't have to be an expert to think that has some validity. It's obvious. I am just quoting the expert theories, anyway.
The point really is: interventions like 'change the quality of food in America' are not things doctors can, like, prescribe to people. But they are things we can aspire to do. They will just take social movements instead of medical treatments to pull off.
I feel like the dream solution is more like tree-based content: you see content that is vouched for by people you vouch for; if someone's account is compromised then their vouches get updated to not matter anymore, cutting their whole tree off at the root to make it invisible. Spammers should end up in largely disconnected components of the trees.
Pretty much what xwitter / bsky is on the following page.
The algorithm layer atop twitter was pretty good connecting me with people/content before daddy elon came along. And this algorithm layer is actually needed (in my view) to make the social network thing work, otherwise there is no critical mass
Thankfully bsky is not that good, so I don't get hooked by it at all. But i miss it
1. get some people who trust you to vouch for you when you join (similar to requiring an invite to join but maybe more flexible?)
2. some kind of induction process, maybe the algorithm surfaces your stuff and gets feedback, like the 'new' queue on HN
3. same as before but the AI tries to do it (scary though)
4. use the same account as on other sites, or otherwise tie it to a global reputation or something you had to invest a fair amount to build. Not great for privacy but I think it has to happen eventually; otherwise new accounts are too cheap to make.
Regardless, once you're in the system your credibility is only as good as your contributions, so you should be filtered out again if you're nefarious.
I think the deeper problem is: How would legitimate new person with no reputation and no contacts be able to get a foothold at all if there are masses of bots pretending to be exactly such a person?
A system which looks more at the content that is posted (probably using AI) and tries to decide whether it is spam feels fairer to me than effectively pulling up the ladder on new users.
If people are distinguishable from bots then you should be able to easily distinguish yourself. If they're not, then you need personal vouching to establish who the people are anyway.
Same tree that gave them credentials gives them weight that is used to spread their content.
New User problem has been around for a minute though - wikipedia and stack overflow both faced it, as does every social media platform nowadays.
Reality is, though, new visitors are getting the same blast radius as early adopters got when they started, just that the early adopters now have blast radiuses that are much bigger
"most effective" requires a lot of justification. I think it's empirically false, personally. A system that uses violence to establish norms is fundamentally unstable because it lets whoever can muster the most violence set the rules---meaning people have an incentive to change the system for their benefit and everyone's incentivizes are pointing in different directions. Whereas a system whose behaviors are enforced by overall prosociality will find equilibria that are also generally prosocial and therefore will be defended by everyone, so their incentives point in the same direction, making it more stable.
Nor do I feel the need to, since my goal was only to present the obvious refutation to the (basically fascist) argument I was replying to.
Anyway both are self-evident: prosocial enforcement exists because we see it around us every day and stable prosocial systems are good because people pick them, given the choice.
I think the only thing that really works is to appeal from one's person. Had Mr L said: the flag is important to me, and draping it over yourself like that is something I find disrespectful, given how many peoples' lives were lost in defending it, please do not do that again---then it might have worked to change the child's opinions on the matter. Maybe not right away, cause kids are slow on picking up lessons, but I believe it would have made the opposite long-term impression.[^1]
Whereas the mis-use of shame just turns the child against the teacher and their whole system of values, even if momentarily 'corrects' the behavior. It would have worked if the child already shared Mr L's values, but they didn't, and shaming someone on the basis of a value they don't hold themselves doesn't work at all. And I think that usually the way ones learns values from others is by seeing them exemplified, since they can naturally identify the value of those values and how they benefit everyone. Being threatened does not work. Being admonished because you're hurting someone you didn't mean to hurt does.
There are some epicycles, also. The appeal to respect only works if the child is actually concerned with the teacher's feelings; it won't work if it takes place in an ambient culture of disrespect or apathy. And if the community insists that people be respectful to each other, then if the child continues to mistreat the flag, Mr L now has the legitimate grievance that the child is being disrespectful after knowing better, which is now personal, not in terms of an abstract and un-shared value, and is fair grounds for admonishment. I imagine that this always works a lot better for actually changing behavior and inducing people to treat each other well.
[^1]: I anticipate some people to react that this doesn't work at all in practice and is how we got to a culture of polarization, e.g. progressives moralized about being respected a lot and instead made enemies out of a lot of people who now don't want to respect them at all. I see this as different, because it was often actually using shame but under the trappings of asking for respect: instead of saying "please respect me because I am asking you to" it says "shame on you for not respecting me the way I demand", which is more like what Mr. L said in the story; the feeling that this is an unjust use of power triggers the recipient to turn against it. And anyway it would only work if you're in a respect-based society along with your counterpart; it's not going to work in anonymous unmoderated online discourse.
It doesn't take much of a rainstorm to see localized flooding. Some debris over the storm drain is enough to flood a street. Hard to anticipate that happening.
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