Eric P

"That assumes she holds onto it for the next three decades. Also do the others on the show rent or own their places?" - Eric P

"The publishers have a really easy fix to the eBook situation. They can start selling their books *without* DRM. Till that happens I don't have much sympathy for them." - Eric P

"What's a mystery to me is why every site doesn't at least offer two factor authentication as an *option*, especially as virtually everyone now carries around a device which can function as the second factor. "Type your password" is pretty weak security. "Type your password and the six digit code we just sent to your phone" is pretty good security. It's really not that hard to implement, but it's amazing how many sites (especially banking sites) don't even offer it." - Eric P

"My unscientific and anecdotal observation is that sports are the only thing keeping a whole ton of people from cord cutting. So I wouldn't expect it to happen for that reason. And conversely, those of us who genuinely aren't into sports have a pretty easy time just dropping cable entirely. A cheaper sports-free cable package simply wouldn't be enticing enough as I've already found ways to watch all the shows I care about via other means." - Eric P

"Scenario 1: Comcast does this. It's a customer service and PR nightmare; in a short time you'd have headlines about families getting $1000+ bills, people's grandparents being mysteriously charged for terabytes of data because their computer was hacked, and people hate Comcast even more because they have to think about the cost of every click on the web (Not that Comcast seems to care how hated they are). Scenario 2: Comcast does what they're doing, charging Netflix. Netflix is forced to reduce service and/or raise rates to customers. Netflix looks bad from the customer's perspective. And do you know what competes with Netflix that isn't subject to bandwidth caps or slow lanes? Comcast's VOD, which suddenly looks better by comparison. It's the last one that's the real motivating factor, I think. Comcast is doesn't want to be a low margin commodity serving dumb pipes (which is all anyone wants them to be). They want to be able to sell high margin value added services like movies on..." - Eric P

"My guess is there's two big factors working against entrepreneurship: 1. Health insurance was impossible and/or too costly to get except through an employer, which made being self employed and/or a small employer somewhere between costly and impossible. If that was a factor we should see an uptick in entrepreneurship in the coming years, as people can quit their jobs and get healthcare through the exchanges. 2. Income stagnation for the bottom 99% means fewer and fewer people have the capital to invest in starting a business. That one is harder to solve." - Eric P

"Why are we still dealing with physical cash at all? Credit/debit card infrastructure is thoroughly ubiquitous. I usually have a $20 bill or two in my pocket for emergencies, but I go months in between ATM visits to replace them. And judging by the silence whenever someone asks "Who has cash?" when it comes time to divvy up restaurant checks with my friends, I'm not alone in that attitude. The government would do well to start phasing out coins and paper money alike in favor of plastic cards that tie into a completely electronic system similar to how most of us prefer to handle our money anyway." - Eric P

"Elections are decided on the fundamentals, according to every political scientist ever. So one should expect that Obamacare won't matter much one way or the other." - Eric P

"Yeah, does everyone forget that Republicans traditionally nominate the "next in line"? There wasn't really a runner up last time around, and Ryan had a place on the ticket. Further, he's the only candidate I can think of that has a shot of threading the needle between the tea party wing and the establishment wing. Seriously who else is there?" - Eric P

"When you drink from a can you smell the aluminum, which influences the taste. Pour it out into a glass and the perceptible difference will vanish. It's why craft beer drinkers have always scoffed at drinking from cans too." - Eric P

"I don't think that's a really good comparison. You can't really objectively measure literary quality and art is always going to boil down to subjective tastes in any case; thus it's impossible to win any argument about who the greatest writer ever really is. Violins, on the other hand, are engineered products. You can at least in theory precisely control their inputs (say with robotic hands striking the strings in such a way) and precisely measure their outputs (the sound), and determine objectively which is the best. That said I agree with your general point at least as it relates to such products. It shouldn't be shocking that modern designers and manufacturers are able to beat craftsman of centuries ago, given that we now have access to far more knowledge and far more precision techniques than they did. And that would go for any other such product too." - Eric P

"Coke and Pepsi have two pretty distinct flavors actually. While I'm sure that Pepsi could produce a soda that no one could tell apart from Coke, they really wouldn't want to from a branding/differentiation point of view." - Eric P

"The Simpsons is kind of surreal. One day it just flipped from having a floor of 7.5 to having a ceiling of 7.5. With few exceptions, the best episodes after season 10 don't hold up to the worst episodes before that." - Eric P

"Science is very quantitative but there's not a lot of science journalism that helps make sense of it. See the daily news reports of "X makes you 20% more likely to give you cancer" for example. I don't imagine that Nate Silver can do anything there that good scientists aren't already doing, but if Silver is able to explain it in an accessible way that'll be a net positive for the world. Ditto for economics. Life is vague, but it totally lends itself to this sort of analysis and is probably the most interesting area he could delve into, if he can get the data. OkCupid used to have a data analyst who'd post ridiculously fascinating stuff on their "OkTrends" blog, which is still online though sadly no longer updated. The baby name wizard blog is another fascinating one along those lines. I'm sure Nate Silver can come up with interesting stuff provided he can get access to similarly large data sets." - Eric P

"Isn't the whole "latchkey kids" a thing anyway? Grade school ends at 3:30 or earlier. Parents don't get home until 5:30, if they're lucky. What's an extra hour matter? And in any case, I don't see this as an insurmountable problem, even with staggered schedules. 1. You can shift everyone by an hour or more. Have grade school start at 9:30 and finish at 4:30. That's closer to aligning with parents schedules anyway. 2. You can keep grade school right where it is at 8:30 to 3:30 and simply have high school start and end *after* those times rather than before. Have high school start as late as possible - 10:30-5:30 is a reasonable schedule for a teenager. Move after school stuff to be before school if you have to." - Eric P

"Were I to guess, most of the people making the error don't know the difference between "Astrology" (not science) and "Astronomy" (science). Even the folks I know who are into signs and horoscopes wouldn't call it science. The funny thing, IMHO, is that as pseudo-science goes, it's actually not *total* BS. Well, the part where it has anything to do with constellations of stars is total BS, but as far as how it relates to personality it might not be. Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in Outliers that the birthdays of NHL players tend to be clustered around just after the cut off for the junior leagues. The reasoning is pretty straightforward. If you're born just after the cutoff date, you're almost a year older than someone born just before it. Bigger kids will be the best at almost any sport. They'll get the extra coaching to make them even better, encouraged to try out for higher levels, and eventually make the pro leagues. All because of their birthday. I can attest to it personally in..." - Eric P

"Correction: It's a tax on everyone with a cable subscription, not owners of TV's. It's shit like this that's going to inspire more people to follow the early adopters and become cord cutters." - Eric P

"It's called the Dunning Kruger effect, FWIW. Incidentally I knew items 1, 2, and 4. I was unaware of #5 but that's only because I didn't know what "reforms" it was talking about. I did know that the federal prison system is only a tiny fraction of all prisons. I'd argue with number 3; the intersection of drug policy and incarceration is a lot more complicated than just "Number of people in prison solely for marijuana possession". Honestly I hoped I'd learn something about the actual operation of prisons and life inside one. I'm not sure what movie ever addressed the prison statistics that make up the "Five things you didn't know" in this article." - Eric P

"Additionally stuff like housing and education costs have risen faster than inflation, which means your purchasing power is even lower compared to someone making the same inflation adjusted amount 30 years ago." - Eric P

"In Game of Thrones I think it's less of a big deal to just stretch out the timeline to account for aging. The first five books take place over the course of 3+ years. The show will take place roughly over the course of 8ish, which I think it can manage because the passage of time in the show is pretty obfuscated, it's rarely clear how much time has passed between events. On Walking Dead it's clearer how much time is passing, which makes Carl's aging problematic. I always sort of assumed they'd kill the character before it got to be noticeable, but at this point I guess they'll just ignore it." - Eric P

"I've got no ounce of sympathy for any one of these people. I'm not even in the 5%. I'm maybe somewhere around top 20-25% I think. But I understand that even though I've not personally done anything wrong, the rules that I play by and allow me to live comfortably aren't inherently fair, and I've benefited from that. I've got no problem with any rule changes that might make things fairer overall even if it means I benefit less personally. The inability of these people to show any capacity for empathy or look at anything in any way except for how it affects them personally makes me think that the lot of them really and truly are sociopaths in the psychiatric sense." - Eric P

"Wouldn't a bidding system be more reflective of true supply and demand? You'll get fewer customers demanding rides and more drivers offering them as the average bid price goes up." - Eric P

"History repeats itself until it doesn't. Sometimes it really is different. A few centuries ago, almost all of the jobs involved physical labor. Making stuff meant humans actually making it with their hands and basic tools. Now, almost no jobs involve that. What we consider physical labor today is mostly people operating machines that can do the work of hundreds of people. The few remaining cases where humans are still doing the actual work (not just operating machines that are doing the work) will vanish as robotics continually improve. So humans moved from using our physical strength to do labor to doing mental labor. Knowing what lever to pull, what button to push, using our judgment to tell the machines what to do. When to start, when to stop, whether to do this or that. When necessary we'd make new machines for new tasks. What's now on the horizon is the automation of these brain tasks. We'll no longer need humans to tell the machines what to do. Cars can drive themselves...." - Eric P

"Kevin I thought you were one of those weirdos that was actually fond of talking on phones? In any case I imagine the airlines will mostly develop "no talking" policies even if the phones themselves are permitted. Modern phones offer dozens of ways to communicate with the ground (email, text, facebook, twitter, etc) that this should be a restriction most people can live with and be happy for." - Eric P