goofingaround | 7 years ago | on: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest (2016)
Why do you think so? Given the magnitude of the result, the mechanism might be genetics rather than social immobility.
goofingaround's comments
goofingaround | 7 years ago | on: A rogue Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery
>... he was a natural with numbers who spent every spare minute analyzing theoretical probability papers written by the 13th-century mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci.
Hope Pascal doesn’t read this.
goofingaround | 8 years ago | on: How to Be a Systems Thinker
>... we’re all seeing is that a lot of work that has been done to enable international cooperation ... pulled apart. We’re seeing the progress we thought had been made in this country in race relations being reversed. We’re seeing the partial breakup ... of a united Europe...
> One of the problems when you bring technology into a new area is that it forces you to oversimplify.
It is fortunate that we have thinkers such as this to simplify the world for us.
Should we pine for the united Europe of Rome? Of the Reich?
Was it evil to tear down those cooperative societies?
goofingaround | 8 years ago | on: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble
I don't see the logistics argument in the article.
The article states i) distraction from in-store sales for employees, ii) removing inventory from store shelves, and iii) no credit for stores.
The "stores don't get credit" argument is weak. The article implies that corporate is siphoning credit from stores to online. Sales are down 6% across the board. Samestore sales down 6.5%, online sales down 4.5%. Omnichannel does not create those numbers.
Anyway, the logistics argument depends on more than rates. Fulfilling from a midwest warehouse can be cheap; a warehouse full of product sliding down a markdown curve can be expensive.
I've been surprised by the merchant pushback to omnichannel. I've been hearing "there are no cash registers in the warehouse", etc. for years. Now we expose more inventory to customers and stores complain about selling to the wrong (usually ecommerce) customer.
goofingaround | 8 years ago | on: The unnecessary demise of Barnes and Noble
The "ship from store" argument does not make sense.
Many healthy retailers use omnichannel, ship-from-store, buy-online-fulfill-in-store, etc. These methods can improve fulfillment, increase inventory utilization, and reduce stale inventory.
If a retailer wants to draw down inventory, then just cut replenishment. I believe Target Canada was accused of doing so. Implementing "faux omnichannel" and the associated IT, store processes, etc. would be much harder.
goofingaround | 8 years ago | on: The Problem of Colour
... therefore, neural networks consciously experience color. QED
goofingaround | 8 years ago | on: Wolf Puppies Are Adorable, Then Comes the Call of the Wild
One factor that affects the horse is that humans use ear position to assess a horse's mental state. Most trainers teach riders to pay attention to whether a horse's ears are forward, pinned back, etc. Humans therefore may actively select horses with upright ears.
goofingaround | 8 years ago | on: Over time, leaders lose mental capacities
The research does not support this article (surprise).
- The researchers primed subjects on "power" by having the subject write an essay about a high, neutral, or low power situation. It's not clear that the intervention maps to what the article calls power.
- The researchers did not find statistically significant differences between the low power group and the neutral group. They also did not find significant differences between the neutral group and the high power group. If the neutral group varied this much, are we tracking meaningful differences?
- Is reduced mirroring "damage"? Is reduced mirroring necessarily undesirable? We have no idea.
https://www.oveo.org/fichiers/power-changes-how-the-brain-re...
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