You want to know about the big money? Look into cutting down trees on other people’s property.

Cut down a mature hardwood tree on your neighbour’s lawn and it might cost you tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There’s got to be a way to monetize that.

Yeah, that’s another part of it. Plus the magic of trying to reverse engineer the recommendation algorithms to know what it is that will get your video in front of people.

There’s a difference between things that are based in sound science but aren’t 100% accurate, and things that are based on, at best, untested hypotheses.

I’d put gait analysis along with things like bite mark analysis, phrenology, etc. The appropriate level of trust in it is near zero percent. But, largely because it’s expensive, people convince themselves that something that expensive has to work. It’s similar to a lie detector test. They strap so many different things to you to measure your body, and have an expert in the machine who studies what’s happening. That leads people to believe that it has to work, at least a bit. But, there’s a reason why lie detector tests are generally not admissible in court. Even though they genuinely can tell… something, the potential for them to be misunderstood by the jury is too high for them to be allowed into evidence.

This paper makes it sound like it’s still basically guesswork. It’s a lot like lie detector tests. They don’t really work, but maybe they can be somewhat useful tools when combined with lots of other things?

They already do gait analysis

Are you sure? As far as I’ve seen that’s just pop sci-fi bullshit that has never been proven to work in the real world.

To a certain extent, a lot of streamers do a lot more stuff than actors.

Actors book a job, so some acting, maybe do a promo tour for their movie, that’s it.

Most “influencers” or streamers at least start out doing everything themselves. They need to understand the streaming tech, know how to configure OBS studio, how to edit video, understand the camera, the lighting, if they’re using make up they’re doing it themselves, they need to know how to do their own marketing, etc. And, if they’re live-streaming they need to develop the skill of interacting with their audience while they’re doing something else. Without that parasocial relationship with the audience, they don’t get big, so they need to stay on top of what their chat is saying. Sometimes that’s on top of doing something else like playing a demanding video game.

So, I think streamers / influencers are often doing a more impressive job than actors. For many streamers / influencers I’m much less interested in them. I often have less respect for the way they make money, since it’s so vapid and consumerist. On the other hand, I do admit that it can be a lot of work to master all those domains.

I’ve always hated the “blue, indigo, violet” end of the English words for the rainbow. I only recently found out that the 7 colours of the rainbow in English is especially BS.

At the beginning of Newton’s time, there were thought to be 5 colours in the rainbow: red, yellow, green, blue and violet. Newton added Orange and Indigo because he thought (for spiritual reasons) there should be 7 colours. There were 7 days of the week, 7 planets (known at that time), 7 notes in the (western) musical scale, etc.

But, Newton’s blue isn’t our blue today. For newton, the colour “blue” is what we currently call “cyan”, so the 7 colours of the rainbow were really red, orange, yellow, green, cyan (blue), blue (indigo) and violet. That makes a lot more sense.

But, there really could be arbitrarily many colours in the rainbow. We could have “rust” as a colour, in between red and orange, or “gold” in between orange and yellow. We could even have a spectrum that didn’t include “green” but included “lime” which is between today’s yellow and green, and cyan on the other side, and no “green” at all.

Google’s

Arrrr you sure there isn’t another way to get it?

We used to have that adage about how anonymity made people worse on the internet

Many of us have been saying that’s untrue ever since people started claiming it was real.

All you need to do is go to Facebook to see people being horrible under their own names.

its

It’s true. It’s also true that for our ancestors who toiled in farm fields picking weeds by hand, or risked being mangled by machines in a factory, a cubicle would seem like absolute luxury.

But, comparing ourselves to previous generations of office workers, the only thing that seems similar to what “knowledge workers” have to deal with today are the typing pool / secretarial pool / steno pool from ye olde days:

One place I worked was so overcrowded and loud that everybody on my team was wearing headphones all day long, just to preserve their sanity.

The level of noise and the fact everybody wore headphones to overcome it meant that often the best way to chat with the person sitting within a metre of your desk was by text over signal / google messenger, etc.

That’s the purpose of meetings and meeting rooms.

We had meetings and meeting rooms, but we only went there for required meetings.

I think the kinds of things they were trying to make happen were those informal discussions you sometimes get. That was part of the purpose of having pool tables, ping pong, break rooms with snacks, etc. It was a place where people could bump into each-other without an agenda and talk about what they were interested in without sticking to an agenda.

But, they didn’t seem to realize that the physical space was much less than half the requirement. The other half is that people feel happy, safe, energized, confident, relaxed, optimistic, etc. If you’re stressed out all day because your workspace is way too crowded and lacks privacy, you’re not going to want to do that. If you’re worried you’re going to be hit in the next round of layoffs, you’re not going to want to do that. If you’re getting stack ranked against your teammates and put in the lower half of the stack, you’re not going to have the confidence to bring up your ideas.

It’s also not a coincidence that a cubicle is designed so your back is to the entrance, whereas most offices are set up so that the person sits behind a desk facing the door.

Ah, so nails are a precious commodity, and you should try to make sure you have as many as you can.

In addition, passenger trains are only really useful if they both start and end in built-up urban areas. A train between a ranch in Nebraska and a potato field in Idaho is not going to be serving many passengers.

That means that some of the key land needed for trains is going to be some of the most valuable land there is.

That’s one reason why authoritarian regimes like China have a much easier time building train routes.

Getting datacentres built would take a lot longer if it was necessary to build them in big city downtown areas like you need for a main train station.

No, you don’t understand. I’m not talking about admitting it when you now realize you were wrong in the past.

I’m saying that some of the things you think you’re right about are things you’ll actually regret in the future.

It’s about having humility about even your deeply held beliefs.

I’m sure that’s part of it. Selling enough stock to meet a 5% wealth tax would sometimes mean that selling those stocks would really drop the value of those shares, and therefore drop their on-paper wealth.

But, the simpler explanation is they don’t wanna.

I think it’s pretty clear that if you take all the nails out of a fence it will fall down.

What’s crazy is that he’s only spending less than 1% of what the tax would cost him.

If he spent $10b and managed to save himself a $13b tax bill, he’d still save $3b.

I suspect he’s actually spending much more than $100m. He has probably hired expensive attorneys, expensive accountants, expensive PR firms, etc. We have to hope he hasn’t hired private detectives, hackers, hit men, etc.