bokonist

Interesting, now, in 2015, Facebook is a worse tool for me than it was in 2009. Any tool that my boss is on, my aunt is on, my old high school classmates is on, etc, has lost any coherence to it. I now have to obey standard internet security: anything posted on the internet or on Facebook in my real name has to be treated like it is on my resume. Because, de facto, it is.

If you want to make millions of dollars, if you want to make much more money than the average smart engineer, you need some secret. You need some idea or skill that happens to be the right thing at the right time. Nobody can tell you what that secret is. If Sam could tell you, it would not be a secret.

So you are right. There is something critical missing. What is missing is the actual secret, the actual idea that you have a unique insight into. But nobody can tell you what that will be.

Say that the initial offering is for 10 million shares at $20 a share. Then the price pops to $30. That $30 share price is based on a much smaller net influx of investment. It does not follow that you could have sold 10 million of shares at that price. The $20 price is a discount that is needed to make the market clear a very large number of shares, all at once. Furthermore, the pop to $30 only happened because retail investors know that the institutions buying into the IPO are reputable, long-haul investors like Fidelity, who will not be dumping the stock immediately. So if you don't have Fidelity and other reputable investors putting in money at $20, you will never get the pop to $30. And because of their size and reputation and relationships, institutions like Fidelity will be able to command discounts, like any big buyer can. The IPO-ing company generally needs Fidelity much more Fidelity needs to buy the company's stock. Thus Fidelity can command the discount.

2. You're right, it probably should be SRV.

1) open source the key server with the REST-API 2) allow domain owners to define their own key server via a DNS TXT entry

If the tax was only .1%, the corporation with big pockets would have to raise their bid to millions of dollars in order to bankrupt you. And in that case, just take their bid and walk away with the millions!

It seems fair to me. If you want something protected by the long arm of the state, if you want to impose a burden of DMCA compliance across all of industry, you should have to pay some tax to pay for that service.

From my observation, if someone is smart, they can teach themselves out of a book, with a bit of guidance to keep them on the right track. If someone simply lacks the cognitive power, there is nothing a teacher can do to make them smart. The student can improve somewhat with practice and drilling, but they still plateau at a lower point than the smart student. So we need to spend enough money that their is a guide to help students get through roadblocks, but I see no evidence that we are spending too little to provide appropriate guidance. I think one hour of personal guidance for every 10 to 20 hours of self-practice is a perfectly normal ratio. That is what we do when training new engineers, or learning a musical instrument, and there really isn't much of a way to gain more benefit by increasing the quantity of guidance.

I think that teaching could be improved somewhat, at the high-end. But it could be done by reallocating existing spending, not spending more. I do think that mentorship helps a lot, but mentorship needs to come from an experienced practitioner. So what we need is a system where a programmer can work a job for a few years, then take a mentoring job for a year, then work for a few years, etc. This would require eliminating the need for education degrees, and optimizing teacher's time for personal mentorship rather than grading tests, building lesson plans, and performing classroom management. It really would be an entirely different job than what is now considered a teacher. A "teacher" now is really just a glorified day-care worker, paying them more won't help much.

Education spending has steadily risen over the last fifty years. Years of schooling has steadily increased.

In my experience, the impact of spending money on education is greatly exaggerated. I was a smart kid, probably 2.5+ STD above the norm in IQ, who went to public school for a while, then to private school. In public school, I learned math mostly by going through problems in the text book. At expensive private school, I learned math mostly by going through problems in the text book. Kids who were at the bottom of the bell curve at this private school still struggled, there was nothing money could buy to make them struggle less. The primary benefit of an expensive private school is that I was surrounded with other smart people, who I could have nerdy conversations with, rather than being a weirdo nerd. The second benefit is that you get to start building a network earlier. This benefit was very limited though, as we all scattered after graduation into different locations and careers. Most of that $40k is being spent on luxuries, not on stuff needed to educate, because education is inherently quite cheap. Mostly you just need to read stuff and practice, with just a bit of guidance from a mentor to check your work and keep you on the right path.

Anyone who wants to spend more money on education needs to state exactly what the money should be spent on, why they believe spending that money will have a positive ROI, and also needs an explanation of why the money we are already spending has not equalized things.

Imagine you had the freedom to design an education for your child and a group of his or her peers. Any money that you save could be spent on helping them get started with a mortgage or investing in their startup or spent on interesting travel or vacations. How much would you need to spend to max-out their learning? How would you spend it?