Disqus - Latest Comments for seamusmccauley

Re: Build a Habit-Robot in your Brain | Scott Adams Blog

seamusmccauley — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 08:58:37 -0000

The abandonment of a single, unitary "self" is one of the key themes of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s. See Luke Rheinhart's "The Dice Man" for the best output of the movement, you'd probably like it.

Re: Is The Slippery Slope Real? | Scott Adams Blog

seamusmccauley — Thu, 09 Apr 2015 08:41:58 -0000

I'm afraid you have been misinformed on the benefits of seatbelts Scott. They don't save lives, net - they just transfer instances of mortality and injury from drivers to cyclists and pedestrians by encouraging marginally less safe driving and insulating drivers from its consequences. See eg http://john-adams.co.uk/wp-...

Re: virtualeconomics: Don't bother turning off electronic devices

seamusmccauley — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:33:07 -0000

Yes, fair point that passengers shouldn't be in the cockpit. But re letting passengers bring iPads on board...to be more specific then, they are proposing to change the rules (tomorrow!) so that pilots can have iPads turned on in the cockpit throughout the whole flight but passengers must turn theirs off during take-off and landing. That's crazy, unless the pilots have some sort of special non-interfering iPad.

Re: virtualeconomics: Ad-lapsing, or TV plus or minus ten minutes

seamusmccauley — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:08:34 -0000

It's true, but you still couldn't then join in. If I watch Black Mirror tonight and tweet about it everyone will be all "dude, that was yesterday".

Re: virtualeconomics: Ad-lapsing, or TV plus or minus ten minutes

seamusmccauley — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 07:41:03 -0000

Fair point. We might need to experiment with timings and of course if we actually did it we'd get into an arms race with the broadcasters trying to trick us into seeing ads by changing the timings, but...10 minutes, 45 minutes, whatever the details are I'm sure we could do it.

Re: virtualeconomics: Contra Farmville for Dummies

seamusmccauley — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:10:53 -0000

Thanks! And Nietzsche famously had a strong appreciation of high culture as well so it's a win all around - enjoy Die Valkure cos it's awesome, enjoy the peanut gallery cos, as someone else entirely said, "the mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven".

Re: virtualeconomics: Contra Farmville for Dummies

seamusmccauley — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:19:50 -0000

So you did! If I could keep a thought in my head for ten minutes I'd have tipped the hat to you for it too. So allow me to do so now.

Re: The freedom to be fat

seamusmccauley — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:06:07 -0000

First they came for the drug users, and I did not speak up because I was not a drug user.
Then they came for the smokers, and I did not speak up because I was not a smoker.
Then they came for the drinkers, and I did not speak up because I was not a drinker.

(Etc, and with apologies to Pastor Niemoller and people who get cross about Godwin's Law. But sooner or later, they *always* come for you.)

Re: Groupon Is a Straight-Up Ponzi Scheme

seamusmccauley — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 15:00:20 -0000

The thesis is perfectly sound (if based on some assumptions where data wold be preferable) - the commenters knocking it look like very obvious Groupon rep management sock-puppets to me.

Re: virtualeconomics: Of course it's a bubble

seamusmccauley — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 02:50:14 -0000

Hi Dan. Google acquired Applied Semantics, on which AdSense is based, in 2003 (http://www.google.com/press... but integrating that into Google as AdSense seems to be attributed by Google to one of the 20% projects (see eg reference 180-181 in the Google wikipedia entry). I'd always thought the 20% thing had been going on since day one, but can't find anything confirming or denying that so you're right to take it as nothing more than my say-so until I can prove otherwise.

"Ten years" is hyperbole, though Google didn't implement AdSense as such until 2003 and had been running by then for about five years.

Re: virtualeconomics: BT Fon simply doesn't work

seamusmccauley — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 02:22:14 -0000

Steve - in the UK at least there's only one legal precedent for whether the owner of an unsecured wifi connection is liable for what happens over it, and that precedent was that they're not. T&Cs are more of an issue, since we could all be in breach of contract, but as for incentives...people do lots of things for the collective good in the hope of benefitting from that same collective good, even without economic incentive. We vote, we leave eBay feedback and Amazon reviews, we create Wikipedia. I leave my wifi open so other people can use it. I like to think others will do the same and I will benefit. So far, not so much, but I still do it and say I'm doing it and hope.

Re: virtualeconomics: Of course it's a bubble

seamusmccauley — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 04:52:02 -0000

Agreed. Amazon dips in and out of profitability as Jeff Bezos transforms the business, and no-one sensible minds. It's an unusually well-run business with a refreshing disregard for quarters. But when this very unusual founder-led success story is held up as an example of why it's ok to float any damned thing for a billion dollars on no profits, it's (often) not a helpful or relevant comparison.

Re: virtualeconomics: Another missing secondary market

seamusmccauley — Tue, 31 May 2011 05:06:43 -0000

Ross - the railway byelaw does indeed seem to be the main impediment to making this idea work. Not only would I support a move to remove that rule (and almost any other rule or law you care to mention) I suggest the rule as it stands isn't and can't be enforced. I've often bought tickets for friends and been reimbursed for doing so. If this rule was real the operators would necessarilly refuse to sell more than one ticket per train to each person. I'd be interested to hear the argument they are able to raise for the existence of this rule they don't ordinarily make any show of enforcing.

Re: virtualeconomics: In search of lost nostalgia

seamusmccauley — Wed, 25 May 2011 04:36:34 -0000

I suppose if I had the sense to skim forwards rather than at random I would enjoy a similar effect, with no spoilers!

Re: virtualeconomics: A new role at Holidayextras

seamusmccauley — Sun, 22 May 2011 03:22:14 -0000

Thanks Chris.

Re: virtualeconomics: A new role at Holidayextras

seamusmccauley — Sun, 22 May 2011 03:22:02 -0000

Thanks Craig.

Re: virtualeconomics: A citizen journalism model that really breaks news?

seamusmccauley — Tue, 17 May 2011 17:21:33 -0000

Steffen, thanks for commenting and for the write-up. It seems likely that for the foreseeable future the news will "break" on Twitter, but someone beyond the 500 friends of the guy who breaks it will need to notice before that really matters! Look at the OBL thing from a couple of weeks ago - @reallyvirtual livetweeted the SEALS going in but it took @qwghlm (Chris Applegate in London) spotting the significance before it became news. See eg http://bit.ly/l7S3k1

Re: virtualeconomics: And we thought only Bill wanted to run a charity

seamusmccauley — Tue, 10 May 2011 10:55:24 -0000

Landgrab strategy is a perfectly sensible one - indeed, almost any start-up with competent VCs will be running a landgrab strat and ignoring the chance of profitability until much later. But in this case, rather like eBay's persistent wish that it owned Craigslist, I suspect the companies don't really understand whay they're getting - something that works because it's free and won't work as soon as you try to make any real money from it.

Re: virtualeconomics: And we thought only Bill wanted to run a charity

seamusmccauley — Tue, 10 May 2011 10:31:51 -0000

Hi James

Past tense for Spotify cos now they limit the number of times you can listen to a track for free I've stopped using them. Presumably some people have paid up; presumably some other people are really using it as a music discovery engine. But I used it because it had the best interface for free unlimited online music, and now that's gone I'm back to YouTube.

If I was Microsoft...I'd writw down the $8.5bn immediately as written off. I'd maintain Skype as a free service to generate goodwill. The cash loss in Microsoft terms is basically trivial and if they try to monetise the service it'll die as people migrate to something free so their best case is to use it for PR ("we're the nice guys who give you this incredibly useful service for nothing"). Synergies with their core business will, as always, prove illusory - hell, eBay had the pretty rare potential for real synergies as it broke into verbal haggling cultures and still never found a use for the thing.

Thanks as ever for commenting.

Re: virtualeconomics: But is it true?

seamusmccauley — Wed, 04 May 2011 11:44:09 -0000

Adam - that "voice" thing can go to extremes, of course. Take the Economist, for example, which goes out of its way to appear not to be written by anyone in particular. But generally it's probably desirable for editorial within a particular publication to have a coherent voice and for more free-range pieces to be clearly identified as being by columnists.

Re: virtualeconomics: But is it true?

seamusmccauley — Tue, 03 May 2011 07:02:42 -0000

Tim - maybe to Fairfax? That would be neatest.

Re: virtualeconomics: Little more than a glance at the new economics of news

seamusmccauley — Tue, 03 May 2011 05:26:40 -0000

Hersh - the economics of news have fundamentally changed because of supply and demand. There used to be a very limited supply of news publications (a handful of national and regional newspapers, some TV channels, some radio). Because of this very limited supply there was only a handful of ways for advertisers to efficiently reach those audiences in the appropriate context, so the publishers had a great deal of control over pricing. Now there's millions of ways to reach that audience online, so publishers have very little control over pricing. Supply massively exceeds demand; prices fall; the economics change. It's like owning a gold mine the day after someone finds a way to turn water into gold. Scarcity becomes abundance, so the value of your once-scarce resource collapses.

Re: virtualeconomics: If newspapers really cared about the freedom of the press, most of them would close tomorrow

seamusmccauley — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 13:11:59 -0000

I stand corrected on the Telegraph - remembered last year as a one-off anomaly but clearly not so. Will correct body text when I get to a PC. Thanks for the correction.

Re: virtualeconomics: If newspapers really cared about the freedom of the press, most of them would close tomorrow

seamusmccauley — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 17:16:12 -0000

James - I think the gains are not quite nil, but close to nil. It's a poor exchange, Facebook and Twitter for the fourth estate. Still, democracy (and therefore markets) rest on the assumption that the public knows what it wants and deserves to get it good and hard.

Re: virtualeconomics: Why no-one cares about the royal wedding

seamusmccauley — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:41:06 -0000

Impressed you've come up with a more cynical interpretation than mine...