Michael Foody

Twitter is sort of stupid. The character limit is really restrictive and bars all but the most banal information from being disseminated. The community is has an off-putting self-promotional streak where there’s this implied quid pro quo of follow me and I’ll follow you tit for tat. The trending topics are almost always stupid and [...]

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There’s a big move to replace incandescent bulbs with compact florescent bulbs. Compact fluorescents require much less energy than traditional incandescents. Which means that they’re much more efficient. Yes, they’re much more efficient at converting electricity to light. Compact florescent bulbs are probably going to be more efficient as a rule, but the truth isn’t [...]

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This seems to me like an obviously great idea. Not many people get sued for piracy, those that do get sued face fees fare out of proportion with the actual crime a company could offer insurance at a low monthly premium and be profitable even when you take selection bias into account.  See also: insurance [...]

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I’ve heard people complain that ebooks on the amazon kindle are too expensive considering the fact that the marginal cost of an ebook is pretty much zero. The problem with this analysis is that by far the greatest cost of reading an ebook is not the monetary cost of purchasing but the opportunity cost of [...]

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Ebay was one of the first big internet businesses to be profitable. It was a natural fit for the internet, it allowed people to make really specific connections that allowed both parties to profit from an exchange that would otherwise be impossible. It was such a perfect business for the medium that its success seems, [...]

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Blogs are written in reverse chronological order. This makes sense because the reader typically values currency and is most interested in the newest content. This idiosyncrasy creates a couple problems. Readers are used to texts being written from left to right (which is the easier way to write if you are right handed since [...]

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Nostalgia as far as I can tell doesn’t have an opposite. This is pretty natural because the idea of nostalgia contains a set of ideas with opposites a looking backward and a positive feeling about what you see. So the opposite of could either be a looking backward with a negative feeling or a looking [...]

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