jonnathanson

See, what's interesting to me is that the grandparent comment describes "50 Shades" as ~8 hours of reading. The zero-sum argument assumes that reading time is some fixed value for all people. I don't remember how long it took me to read "50 Shades," but it was significantly less than 8 hours, and couldn't have been more than an hour. (I'm not saying that to brag. It takes me a lot longer to do many other things than many other people. My only point is that the author of the article completely ignores throughput variability in his calculus.)

Depth and breadth, in this case, are not opposite directions on a straight line. They are vectors that only appear oppositional when viewed under specific time constraints. The more prolific a reader you are, the more efficiently you read, and thus your higher throughput dramatically compresses time.

If we're to speak about very specific increments of time and units of reading material -- say, you get to read N books over 1 week -- then sure, the zero-sum argument holds. But a lifetime is so much time, offering so much opportunity to the experienced reader, that time is almost effectively lifted as a constraint.

The only zero-sum quantities in this case are time and number of books. Depth and breadth of subject matter are better described as characterizing subcategories of #_books.

No, I'm not literally suggesting people have infinite time on their hands. Rather, what I'm suggesting is that time compresses when you're reading for pleasure. When you reach a certain "level," shall we say, you read so naturally and so widely and so frequently that it is truly astonishing how much you can read in a day.

Then again, I'll continue to caveat all of this by saying that my subjective experience seems increasingly abnormal every time I read someone's advice on how to read (or write). The idea of deliberately practicing a style or a voice is weird to me. I've always written by ear, and I've never thought about it. I've thought about structure, and character, and perspective, and logic, and all of the other elements that go into writing well. But when it comes to voice and style, well, shit, man. You pick it up as you go along, and you learn to trust it. It strengthens, not weakens, with exposure to breadth.

One last time: I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my experience is probably weird.

While I don't disagree with the author on his points, I find them premised on faulty logic. His thesis assumes that depth and breadth are zero-sum pursuits. I suppose they are if time and energy are limiting factors, but to those who read and write for the love of the game, those limits are lifted.

When it comes time to settle down on a voice and hone your craft, sure, I would never recommend you switch up your style for the hell of it. But if you want to read widely, and if doing so refines your style, great. Go for it. It probably will.

Again, the way the author characterizes this 'problem' is jarringly foreign and antithetical to my own experience. Perhaps I lack the objectivity to see it the way the author does.

This article is horseshit. I'm a professional writer, and I'll trust Oates and King over whoever this guy is.

"Read widely" isn't some religious dictum. It's more of a religious calling. (Of sorts.) If you love to read, and you love to write, you naturally read all fucking day. Your thirst is unquenchable. Your tastes are varied. So you drink from many different fountains.

You also realize there is no trade off between depth and breadth. It's a false dichotomy. It seems to be manufactured by people who find the act of reading some sort of chore. I do not. I find it the highest pleasure I have ever experienced.

Perhaps there's a difference between being naturally curious and being forced to read broadly. I dunno. I've never had to be forced. I like reading and writing the way many of us like programming. I'm truly sorry if the author does not. Writing's a hell of a shitty way to make a living; I can't imagine what it'd be like if you didn't at least enjoy the sport of it.

My god, this brings back some formative memories. Memories of AOHell. Memories of HappyHardcore, the self-styled hacker who claimed authorship of it. Memories of hanging out in Warez chat rooms, where everyone showed up in phished accounts to trade 'warez' and conspire to troll various AOL communities. Memories of taking apart System 7 shareware games with ResEdit and, in so doing, learning how they worked.

Those were the days, man.

I think you're right, but I do like pishpash's solution of converting to currency value at the time of theft and then applying some sort of interest calculation. This divorces the damages of the theft from the hypothetical asset value of milkshakes over time.

So essentially we set damages at t0 currency value of the milkshake, plus interest over N years. Seems reasonable.

If milkshakes were illiquid, and could only be bought and sold every N years, that would seem to peg damages to asset value instead of currency value. Or am I wrong?

I'm inclined to agree under that assumption. [Edit: same!]

In the scenario I've presented, I think you're correct. This is because milkshakes are liquid (both literally and figuratively), and because they are replaceable.

If we add the condition that milkshakes are not replaceable, does that change the outcome? I'll stfu now if this is derailing things.

Hypothetical problem... Let's imagine a universe in which milk is a rare commodity, and milkshakes are worth their weight in gold. In this world, right now in 2017, 1 milkshake trades for $100 USD. You have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake. So we each hold the equivalent of $100. I drink your milkshake, effectively stealing $100 from you.

Fast forward to the year 2020. Milkshakes are now worth $1,000,000 USD. Have I deprived you of $100, or have I deprived you of $1,000,000? (Note that we can't seem to use retroactive NPV analysis in 2017, since in 2017 we had no way of accurately predicting how milkshakes would be priced in 2020.)

On the one hand, I appear to have imposed a severe opportunity cost on you. On the other hand, I haven't taken the world's only milkshake from you. So what I've literally stolen from you in 2017 is the present value of the milkshake, $100.

IANAL, and I will confess that I have no idea how a court of law would evaluate this case. But in economic terms, it certainly feels as though I've deprived you of more than $100. So what have I actually taken from you?

[EDIT: This post was meant to pose a question. It was not meant as a frank disagreement with the parent post per se. I've cleaned up the wording a bit to try to make it clearer.]

Atlantic salmon aren't "different" enough from the various Pacific salmon species to occupy their own niche in the Pacific Northwest. If the big ones are too big for you, there are also medium-sized species and smaller species.

The Atlantic salmon is a big, predatory fish that needs to eat a lot of smaller species to stay alive. In the Pacific Northwest region, pretty much every species that could sustain the Atlantic salmon is also preyed upon by an extant, native salmon variety of some stripe. If the Atlantic salmon possessed some sort of advantage in obtaining one prey species or another, then there you go, there's a niche it can adapt to. Thus far, we haven't seen that advantage materialize, or the niche appear.

I apologize if some of the nuance of this point was lost in my "bigger, faster" figure of speech. My tl;dr here is that exotic species don't just magically, automatically win in a new environment simply because they're exotic. To thrive, their exoticism needs to confer some specific competitive advantage within the local ecosystem. I'm struggling to see what that advantage is for the Atlantic salmon in the Pacific Northwest, simply because the oceans and waterways in that region are teeming with very, very similar competitors.

I would be highly suspicious of anything calling itself "wild" and "Atlantic" in the same breath. There is almost no wild Atlantic salmon fishery left in the United States and Canada. It's all farm raised. Occasionally you can find legitimately wild Atlantic catch in Scotland or Norway. But wild catch makes up less than 1% of all Atlantic salmon on the market.

So if you want wild salmon, start by looking for a Pacific label, a listed species, or a regional designation of some kind. That's still not a guarantee, but it narrows things down quite a bit.

For what it's worth, 90% of all salmon on the US market is farmed. So if you're at a restaurant or a BBQ and aren't sure what you're getting, you're probably getting farm-raised Atlantic salmon.

Right, but genetic diversity of the breeding population would be very low, making the population itself very fragile. And that's assuming the spawn survive their first season. (Most young salmon spawn do not survive, and those not native to the local waters face unique challenges.)

This doesn't seem to be a case where the invading species gains an immediate upper hand in its new environment. (Cf., the rampant python population in the Florida Everglades.) In this case, the invading Atlantic species faces stiff and probably superior competition from the various Pacific salmon species, which are every bit as big and fast, and which fill the same ecological niche. Hell, a Pacific Chinook will get twice as big as an Atlantic salmon. It also knows the territory, including where and what to hunt, and its wild instincts haven't been dulled in a fish farm.

If I were a betting man, I'd wager on the native Pacific populations over the scattered pockets of farm-raised exotics nearly 99 times out of 100. Barring human involvement, of course. If we hunt the Pacific species out of existence, or damage the environment beyond recognition, all bets are off.

The conflict of interest (companies are also advertisers) is powerful, and it appears to be exerting a significant effect on the directional reliability of aggregate reviews for any company large enough to be a major advertiser. Companies can badger Glassdoor into removing negative reviews, and Glassdoor will ask few to no questions before taking summary and unappealable action in the company's favor.

The negative reviews are pretty much the only interesting data points on the site. Take them with a grain of salt, sure. But you have to take the positives (especially large cohorts of positives over short time intervals) with the whole freaking salt shaker. The aggregate scores offer some directional guidance, but bear in mind that you are not looking at the total sample size of reviews; you are looking at the sample size after the company has culled and gamed what it can, which is often quite a lot of the original pool.

This is sort of like the directional reliability of eBay scores, now that there is a short decay on past reviews, and pretty much anyone with 10 minutes on their hands can get negative reviews expunged.