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Umalu's comments

Umalu | 10 years ago | on: Why are little kids in Japan so independent?

Japanese parents probably were never warped by "milk carton kids" -- throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the U.S., we'd see missing kids plastered on the sides of our milk cartons. It made people think that kids were being kidnapped by strangers all the time, when in fact nearly all the missing kids shown on the cartons were either runaways or were taken by a parent involved in a custody dispute (bad, sure, but not the same thing as a stranger kidnapping them). The national hysteria that resulted from this led to our current era of helicopter-parented kids. I was a kid just before all this happened, so I consider myself a member of the last generation of free range kids in the U.S.

For more information see http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2402/how-many-kids-...

Umalu | 11 years ago | on: China

Two disparate observations:

1. US GDP per capita is still almost 8x that of China: $53,042 US vs. $6,807 China (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD). While there are other ways to measure this (such as the PPP Sam cites), the magnitude of difference remains large. So even if China's economy in the aggregate is larger than the US's, the US is still much richer per capita.

2. As China grows richer, I expect the US will too. In modern inter-connected economies with few trade barriers growth in one generally benefits the other too. One example would be as one country's citizens gain greater purchasing power, they become bigger consumers of the other country's goods and services.

Umalu | 14 years ago | on: BankSimple invites first customers; rebrands itself as Simple

There are actually laws prohibiting non-banks from using the word "bank" in their name. A lot of bank holding companies (which are not, technically, banks) got around this by replacing the "k" in "bank" with a "c" -- such as "BancAmerica Corp". I'm sure we all breathed a sigh of regulatory relief seeing that "c" there.

Umalu | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Reading Non-Fiction

I have this quote from Charlie Munger taped above my desk: "You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality. If you don't have the cast of mind, you're destined for failure even if you have a high IQ." Here's a tip on reading non-fiction: It is very easy to get into a rut reading and re-reading what you already know. To achieve broader understanding leave your comfort zone and read what don't know. That is much harder to do well, but much more rewarding if you want to truly understand why things are happening. I scan book reviews looking for ecstatic reviews of books in areas I don't know. It's hit-and-miss, but I've learned so much more this way.

Umalu | 15 years ago | on: Obsession Times Voice

I love this Walt Disney quote from the post: "We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies." That is exactly what separates great content providers (the top 1%) from hacks (the other 99%). HN commenters often dismiss John Gruber as the uber-reflexive Apple fanboy he is, but posts like this suggest there are deeper waters.

Umalu | 15 years ago | on: Why did Google take a $3B loan with $37B already in the bank?

A lot of cash rich multi-national companies have this foreign cash "problem." They earn it overseas and can't bring it back without paying U.S. tax on it, so they leave it there. On page 31 of Google's 10-Q it says that $17 billion of its $37 billion cash hoard at March 31, 2011 was held outside the U.S. and was unlikely to be repatriated to the U.S. for tax reasons. Of course that still leaves them with $20 billion in the U.S., plus whatever they've earned in the U.S. since March 31, 2011, but I guess borrowing an extra $3 billion at ultra-low US Treasury-like rates is an historically cheap way to top up the tank.

Umalu | 15 years ago | on: Inside Google's Secretive Data Centers

If Steven Levy's "In the Plex" reflects current reality, Google buys very cheap failure-prone HDDs and builds in a lot of redundancy: "Google's first CIO, Douglas Merrill, once noted that the disk drives Google purchased were 'poorer quality than what you would put into your kid's computer at home.'" [page 183]

Umalu | 15 years ago | on: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To Miss Almost Everything

When I turned 40 I figured my odds of living another 40 years were pretty good. I then figured that if I continued to read one book a week (my average) for the rest of my life, I would read another 2,080 books. That sounds like a lot but really it isn't, especially when one considers how many great books there are out there that one hasn't read. Many more than 2,080! So now when I consider reading another book I ask myself if it looks good enough to be one of my 2,080. Many books do not make that cut. I think it's been a good filter and I expect as I grow older, and I have fewer and fewer books looks left to read, I will get even more selective in what I read.

Umalu | 15 years ago | on: The real reason people are mocking Color...

You nailed it. Who is more mockable: the start-up with a 1.0 product that accepts a ton of VC money, or the VCs who threw the ton of money at them? How many hackers with a 1.0 product wouldn't take the VC money in the same circumstances? I'm sure some might refuse to take more than they thought they deserved, but that has got to be a tiny percentage. The real question is what the VCs saw to cause them to believe that this was worth what they paid. Given that others are not seeing it in the 1.0 product, it either has to be something else that's coming, or it has to be a pretty stupid investment. Either way, if someone is to be mocked, it's not the entrepreneurs who accepted the money.

Umalu | 15 years ago | on: Buffett Says Social-Networking Sites Overpriced Ahead of Public Offerings

Buffett: "One of the things we try very hard to do at Berkshire, is to stay within what I call our circle of competence."[1] It would surprise me greatly if the social network sphere is within Buffett's circle of competence, and it would surprise me even more if he thought it was, and so I would interpret his comments about it accordingly.

[1] http://seekingalpha.com/article/148662-circle-of-competence-...

Umalu | 15 years ago | on: All 1,926 public school teachers in Providence fired

I suspect this was done to defeat a union contract that made it difficult to shrink the workforce. The logic behind collective bargaining is "if you don't like it, you have to fire all of us." That's usually a good tactic, as most employers arent willing to do that, but sometimes the bluff gets called. In terms of how this impacts education, it depends on whether this is a trend and how you feel about unionized teachers.

Umalu | 15 years ago | on: The Billionaire Who Is Planning His 125th Birthday

Caloric restriction requires you to eat food that is denser in nutrients. Many who don't eat much do so because they're poor and can't afford enough food, let alone food that is denser in nutrients. That is why, on average, those with lower body weights have lower mortality. Those who assiduously follow a CR diet rich in nutrients may live longer, but they must be a tiny slice of the pie.
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