wb36

Memrise.com (primarily for learning the vocabulary of another language) combines spaced repetition with mnemonics. When learning a particular piece of vocabulary it will offer up an ordered list of suggested mnemonics based on their popularity in other sets. Extremely effective for its use case.

"Vista has yet to unload some of its biggest bets,"

Translation - the majority of the returns reported here are based on estimated valuations calculated by Vista rather than actual returns resulting from business sales. It goes without saying that 99.99% of the time this means the returns are inflated. It is possible that they've only calculated returns based on companies sold, but unlikely.

So not only can they manipulate the valuation on firms they haven't sold to make their funds look better. Even with that + the ability to fudge IRR numbers, their last few fund returns are not so mind blowing that we should believe these guys have a magic formula.

Small child in business school here - in our vernacular, this means remove lines of business not turning a profit. Many are kept around either in hopes they'll get better or because executives think they round out a basket of offerings and maybe people are more likely to allow us to perform their cancer surgery if they know we also do neonatal surgery. So even though our neonatal unit loses money, let's keep it. The Vista camp here would say - that's a bs theory, let's focus on getting better at what we're good at rather than trying to make a business line profitable we've already spent 5 years demonstrating we don't know how to make profitable.

Instead of debating the criteria for entrance into these elite schools, why not look at what makes them such great schools and replicate that elsewhere? Sure, in so far as being surrounded by top students who study all the time improves the environment, the current elite is likely to remain the elite and the admissions criteria should still be discussed. But if the gap between the quality of those schools and the others wasn't so vast, it would no longer feel like the difference between being guaranteed success in life vs. being doomed to failure.

So sad but true

"when your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity."

On the contrary, Tribe by sebastian junger has me fairly convinced me that the irony here is that people band together, find a sense of belonging and often psychological well being under strenuous circumstances more naturally than they do in peaceful, every man for himself and his or her own pursuit of happiness times.

You can't patent an idea, only an implementation of an idea.