5040

I think about this sometimes. In the golden age of the clipart, every utility pole had some. Lost dogs, yard sales, babysitting services. You name it. If the complaint with AI is that it requires little effort or skill to use, and replaces the work of an artist, why was there no pushback against clipart?

And speaking of Cato and economic complexity:

As his income grew, Cato also became a regular investor in commercial lending. Although a law from 218 BC banned senators from engaging directly in commercial shipping, Cato formed partnerships of fifty investors that backed the commercial operations of fifty ships. He fronted all of the initial capital and then lent money to investors that they could each use to buy a share in the enterprise. Cato himself entrusted one share to a freed slave who acted as his agent. He then profited from the trading activities as well as the interest on these loans, while following the letter of the law and limiting his direct exposure in case the cargo was lost.

Kindle made it easy to report errors in ebooks, but I always found myself wondering if the errors I was flagging were even being looked at.

You can trade your time for goods, but others might trade money for time. Something to think about maybe.

Free Shakespeare in the Park is a New York City civic tradition dating back to the 1950s. It is, as the name suggests, free to the public, but because Central Park’s Delacorte Theater has a finite number of seats, tickets are given out on a first come, first served basis. Some folks, who either can’t or don’t want to stand in line to get tickets, have taken to employing line-standers to do the waiting for them. According to Sandel, the price for a line-stander in 2010 was “as much as $125 per ticket for the free performances”

Lots of people were confused about the purpose or utility of 'micro-blogging.' It only really clicked for people once you had minor celebrities using the platform to crowd-source information, advice, and ideas from fans.

Consider the plight of the dentists and doctors:

>There were some 90 dentists and around 30 doctors operating in the City, for the most part trained in China but unable to operate in Hong Kong without taking more exams. The City provided a handy alternative and they were allowed to operate there without oversight from the authorities. Many were actually very good at their job and attracted patients from a wide area – including a number of policemen to our knowledge – the best of them with smart premises along Tung Tau Tsuen Road that ran along the north side of the City.

>"people living in squalor is their right!"

For many, a big part of the appeal was the low costs of living. Surely choosing relative squalor with low prices should be an option?

>Most people have terrible eyes for distinguishing content

A related phenomenon is not being able to hear the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps. I find the notion astonishing, and yet lots of people cannot tell the difference.

Plenty of reasonable scientists support a political party which explicitly denies the existence of biological differences between groups of humans. In the final analysis, it seems scientists will align with organizations that hold unscientific tenets. It's probably not really a big deal.

I was asking ChatGPT about a "squiggled s" yesterday. It thought I meant ß, but the character I was actually interested in was §. Context was obscure keyboard layouts.

I miss those days too, but my recollection of Youtube is a little different. Lots of piracy for example.

The regurgitated content is often in the form of comments in popular threads.

Reminds me of this:

>Jeff Bezos(01:34:00) We were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents, and I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then.