bsandbox

Reminds me one of Michael Lewis' anecdotes from The Big Short. Something along the lines of one of the big Wall Street banks transferring tens of billions of dollars to the Fed by literally gathering up a set of bonds from their safe, putting them in a briefcase and giving them to a secretary and an armed guard to carry to the building across the street where the Fed had set up an impromptu office.

It's a great book, a classic, and it's interesting to know how highly pg respects it.

When I look at leaders, the thing that I see more and more is the ability to not stress out about situations. Coming up with solutions is less important; putting everything in perspective is the key. Much of this comes down to empathy and being a nice person, as you describe.

I think people's sense of personal safety is a bigger driver than revenge. In general, people want a hard line on anything that impacts their sense of personal safety. In order to feel safe, people want punishment to prevent others from committing the same crime.

(Of course the flaw in this thinking is that punishment does not always prevent criminals from committing a crime).

Making endeavors like this scale is an interesting problem. On the surface, this is inherently unscalable, but it does prove that a novel idea can spark latent compassion to create something truly awesome. The obvious thought is applying something like Batkid to third world cases, but it would end up helping out a few cases in the millions that exist. A cynical view is to look at this as an example of first world individualism triumphing over the greater need of larger populations, but I think it's worth thinking about it the other way round - how might it be possible to use compelling stories like this to solve a larger population of problems.

Or, Right Click > View Page Source

Those outcomes are likely. Although it's also possible that:

* next-quarter results are "less bad" than expected, and the large band of short sellers have to start buying to cover

* insiders feel that the stock is unfairly priced and are willing to hold on until it improves

* Facebook's IPO is a roaring success and generates a rising tide for all internet stocks

I think the first one has the most chance of happening. The stock is heavily shorted right now, any news that's not negative has the chance of sparking a rally.

Certainly possible that they would make more money, but I doubt it. Doing some (very) rough math, HBO has about 28M subscribers. Cable customers pay $18 bucks a month for HBO, of which HBO usually gets 50%. So an overnight change in the business model would require 28M subscribers at about $9 / month.

Just as a point of comparison, Netflix, with a much larger catalog of shows and movies, has something of the order of 25M subscribers

Obviously an overnight change would not happen, there would be a transition over several years and the streaming subscribers may well be supplementary to existing subscribers. But during the transition, cable company partnerships would be strained and existing revenue would be at risk. Not to mention the capital investment required to provide the content reliably, dealing with the multitude of streaming devices, providing customer support, marketing the product directly to consumers and all the other things that cable companies take care of (albeit badly). Netflix is making bold changes in its business model and it's certainly not an easy thing to do.

Ultimately, HBO's core competency is in creating amazing content. It's arguable if they'd make more money by changing their business model, but I'd wager that HBO execs simply do not want to have to deal with all the distractions from their core mission that would occur by doing so.

It's not that they wouldn't prefer to get their money earlier. It's that they are in bed with the cable companies, who have significant power because they provide a huge chunk of HBO's revenue. HBO don't want to risk losing that revenue by disturbing the cosy relationship.

Cable companies are fiercely protective of their status as content providers. As they see it, the biggest threat to cable is that it gets turned into a commoditized dumb pipe. Any move by partners like HBO in the direction of supplying content over IP is seen as a move towards marginalizing their business.

Yes, initially. But as the manufacturing processes mature, these prices reduce dramatically over time. Price reductions of an order of magnitude are not unusual over the course of two or three years.

I'm unaware of any collection of humans in history that did not practice some form of religion. I suspect that religion will become extinct only when we humans do too.

That raises an important ethical question.. should we not let them know about vim?

That was my general perspective too.. ie. that Anglo was the biggest source of the problem. So I was surprised to read this line:

"In October 2008, the Irish Independent published a list of the five biggest real-estate deals in each of the past three years. A.I.B. lent the money for 6 of the 15, Anglo Irish for just 1, as a co-lender with A.I.B."

Clearly the bank guarantee was a disastrous decision, and in hindsight could have been handled very differently. But at the time, as Lehman and AIG and Fannie and Freddie were in chaos, it didn't seem all that outrageous.