I've never heard of a guessing reward before. I've heard of guessing penalties, though. Back when I took the AP exams, there was a penalty (negative points awarded) for guessing, whereas leaving a multiple-choice question blank was worth 0 points. (This stopped being the case in 2011.)
I wonder if you would have any luck escalating this to Chesky, Gebbia, et al. The Airbnb founding team really seems to take pg's advice on start-ups seriously. I'm sure that they're huge proponents of delighting their users, which your experience obviously isn't an example of.
Palantir's philanthropy engineering team works with an organization called Community Solutions to help shelter the homeless.[0][1] (Full disclosure, I interned on this team last year.)
The Michael Larson story is absolutely fascinating. The Game Show Network produced a made-for-TV documentary about this called Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal that I highly recommend watching. If I remember correctly, they brought in Long and Litras to play a re-created Press Your Luck game, who were both successfully taught how to time the board the way that Larson did. If one knew the board as well as Larson did, it'd be easier to beat than any arcade timing game.
If you're interested in game show cheating scandals, I also highly recommend Major Fraud, a documentary about a cheater on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The summary of that one is an audience signal via coughing.
Charles Ingram, a former British Army major, won £1,000,000 after his wife (planted in the audience) coughed to signify each correct answer. Unlike Larson, his winnings were rescinded.
Off-topic nitpick: I wouldn't quite go that far with regards to your characterization of Hill. Hill entered the Witness Protection Program because he was convinced that Jimmy the Gent was going to kill him, and if I remember correctly, he had to be convinced to do so by the prosecutor of his case.
I don't necessarily have a problem with professional athletes doping in a black box, i.e. free of influencing others. Professionals should be fully aware of the health effects of "riding the bicycle," and it's hard for me to argue against telling people what they can do to their own bodies.
I always thought, however, that the big issue with steroids was the role that athletes play in the lives of children and teenagers. It's really not okay for high school athletes to use steroids. I was under the impression that professional athletes using steroids influences budding athletes to use steroids both directly ("I can get to where Barry Bonds is by using steroids") and indirectly (feeling pressured to use PEDs in order to compete). I seem to remember this being a controversial topic in the news 10-15 years ago.
Steroid use in professional bodybuilding isn't as big of a deal as steroid use in professional sports. While part of that is attributable to the goals of those respective fields, another part is attributable to bodybuilders not being widespread role models in the way that baseball or basketball players are.
I don't buy the 'think of the children!' argument for a second. If a person wants to use, they're going to use, regardless of what drug or their age. What really causes problems is all the lies, misinformation, and unrealistic expectations about what they can achieve with or without drugs. People think that the drugs are magic and will close the gaps in their training. It really is all about training- as the article says, the drugs are used because the human body isn't able to recover quickly enough from the volume of training required of professional athletes; in most sports it has nothing to do with adding more muscle. In fact most athletes don't want to add muscle willy-nilly because it makes it harder to move. If professional athletes were able to honestly discuss the drugs that they use and their dosages I think it would make things safer for young athletes, because most people don't understand how low the dosages that they take are and it would PROVE that you can't replace hard training with drugs. There are young athletes now taking dosages that far exceed what even world class athletes would consider because there's no honest discussion around them, they can't make informed decisions.
Tl;dr: Hiding information never makes people safer. If Barry Bonds published his training program and drug stack, nobody would ever be stupid enough to think that "I can get to where Barry Bonds is by using steroids"; instead it would prove that the only way to compete with Barry Bonds is to train your ass off.
Low dosage will have a placebo effect, at best.
Good nutrition and sleep is far more effective.
Ask anyone with a lot of experience (20 years of usage) and he/she will tell you that it's not worth it! (unless there's a monetary incentive).
Elite athletics (15+ training sessions/week) is not healthy, and we do not want to make it even more unhealthy by allowing athletes to train even harder.
I tried to find the original reasoning for banning doping and couldn't do so. According to Wikipedia the IOC banned doping in the 1960s after some sports federations began to do so. It was widespread at the time.
I imagine the original reasoning was mostly due to the notion that "it is against the competitive spirit and destroys the integrity of the game". Honestly that is still the best reasoning for banning doping in my opinion. Maybe it is just personal opinion but doping in baseball almost destroyed the sport because of a tarnished reputation. If I knew doping was allowed in say gymnastics for example I wouldn't watch it at all, it would become boring. Sure, I am likely overvaluing the effects of doping in gaining an advantage but I think the biggest problem is that of attribution.
How do I correctly attribute skill to a player I know is doping, or a sport that is full of doping? If we ever get to the point where sports radio is filled with discussions about "Well, this guy is really good but Jordan didn't have XZ-87 injected into his body so you know how can we compare them?" then I think the integrity of sports is simply dead. Maybe sports become something else and we are all fine with it but in my opinion doping destroys the integrity and spirit of sports and that is still the best argument against it.
Drugs don't increase "skill," though. And on the contrary, if everyone was doping I think the event might actually be more interesting to watch since the average fitness of the players would be increased.
I don't have a source, but possibly a rationale you might agree with: It tarnishes records.
Mark McGuire destroyed the home run record, and then it was discovered he was using juice. Would he have broken it either way? Maybe, we'll never know.
You can argue that baseball stadiums shape changes over time, bat technology changes, we learn more about nutrition and training, etc. and they're valid points. That should be how records are broken naturally. It diminishes the achievement, to me, when those before you did it naturally, and you did not.
Would lance have won that many tours, and in a row? Maybe, but now we'll never know, and its a record that may never be broken naturally. Yes, I realize its not actually an official record anymore.
> ... it's hard for me to argue against telling people what they can do to their own bodies.
This isn't a broad dictation, though. This is athlete governing agencies working to protect the "purity" of sport. Participating in those associations means you follow their rules: don't want to follow their rules? Don't join.
You're more than welcome to start a competitor to Union Cycliste Internationale and announce that doping in your sponsored events is allowed. But in this group, you're required to dope (to be competitive). And now you're back to effectively telling people what to do to their own bodies.
> It's really not okay for high school athletes to use steroids.
At what point do we transition from "not ok" to "people can do what they want to their own bodies"? Age 18? What about parents who authorize plastic surgery for their 16 year olds—can they authorize doping regimens, too?
So then we're back to standards and sports governing bodies. The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) says "no steroids". NFL/NBA/etc. says "A-OK". What about NCAA?
We can draw the line that says, "steroids for professionals only", but that sets up a chicken-or-egg scenario. To play on a professional level, you have to dope, but to dope, you have to play on a professional level. How does one become a professional, then?
Exactly, you shift the goalpost for attainable performance and the minimal performance necessary to be professional. A good example of this is e-sports, where it's well known, especially among FPS players that people competing are using stimulants -- and this has been the status quo for more than a decade. Which might be neutral, if things like steroids/stimulants weren't so terrible for you, but they have noticable consequences for your health.
Certainly influence on the young is part of it, but it's also a matter of keeping the sport at a level that everybody agrees to and understands. In some sports, doping is accepted- there are separate leagues for natural athletes. So my only issue is that if everybody agreed to not dope, and the understanding is that the athletes are clean, yet some dope, then those who are doping are cheating.
If everybody agrees that doping is ok, and it is the understanding of the participants that to compete you have to dope, then I'm fine with it.
To me, it's really about your relationship to the other competitors more than the horrors your actions may inflict on society.
We see something similar in academia. There are performance-enhancing drugs that academics can take to have greater periods of intense work, and out-compete their competitors. It's up to the academics to set the standard for what is acceptable.
It's not just the children but anyone outside the realm of a "pure competitor" who winds-up harmed unfairly by doping.
The average professional cycling or the average professional American football player is not wealthy and is not competing purely for the love of the sport. Rather, they are only moderately well-paid, not terribly likely to reach the true big time and working extremely hard just to stay in the game. Often they come from impoverished backgrounds and view sports as their way out (and often it isn't). Essentially, competition is their work. It's fairly morally repugnant to create a work-environment that impels someone to use dangerous drugs just to literally stay in the game. It's not as bad as the factory owner that dopes his workers with speed to improve production but it's headed in a similar exploitative direction.
I am not quite clear what the difference is between your examples and, say, startup CEOs who choose to use stimulants to deal with a crushing workload.
Or, ignoring drugs, every professional boxer runs a risk of long term brain damage, yet they still choose to do it, despite most of them meeting your criteria of not being especially wealthy/ solely doing it for love of the sport.
The point the poster you responded to was making the point that Zuckerberg may be satisfied with just Facebook, whereas Larry and Sergey choose to pursue other ventures in addition to Google. The poster wasn't making a point about talent or luck.
Even with that, Zuckerberg isn't 100% focusing on the Facebook core product; look at the Connectivity Lab, for example.
Watching the videos on the CCTV America link reminded me of some basic (but apparently necessary) safety advice. If you're ever in a situation like this, don't stand by a window filming it! You only have seconds until the blast breaks yours windows (depending on your distance from the epicenter and the explosion strength). From what I understand, the biggest immediate danger is lacerations from flying glass.
Get away from the windows and duck behind something solid.
The shockwave took about seven seconds to arrive, so they were about 1.5 miles away from the blast. It's not intuitive that the explosion can harm you at a distance like that -- as evidenced in more than one amateur video that came out of Iraq of EOD work.
I agree, which is why it's especially necessary advice. Your gut instinct upon seeing that blindingly bright flash should be to duck and cover, whether you're outdoors or indoors.
I wish this didn't have to be so important, since it feels like a Cold War relic, but that's just how things seem to be these days.
"Duck and cover" is a popular target for ridicule, which is weird because it's always been excellent advice, even for global thermonuclear war. The fact that it's good for more conventional explosions lends further emphasis to that fact.
FYI, the clouds aren't pushed away, they are created by the difference in pressure the shockwave (temporarily) creates.
Waves in general do not move matter (except for the temporary oscillation).
Just to expand on this (pun intended), a sound wave is just a change in the local pressure of the fluid it's going through. The rapid and sudden pressure drop across the leading edge of the shock wave causes vapour in the air to condense and form clouds. This happens because lower pressure air has a lower temperature (in this case, because it cannot reach equilibrium fast enough) and lower temperature air holds less humidity. That humidity is the vapour that condenses.
You'll see this same effect on some jet fighters going transonic, contrails from wingtip vorticies on aircraft and other various natural phenomina.
I am sure you are right about the apparent cloud movement in this case, but shockwaves can result from sudden displacement. I read somewhere that Fermi made a good estimate of the Trinity bomb yield by dribbling a stream of shredded paper from his hand. After the shockwave passed him, he paced out the displacement of those that were in the air at the time.
Credit and debit cards are the easiest way to pay in America, since bank transfers are not really an option for merchants. It's really uncommon to pay by check at the point of sale (to the extent where people might respond negatively), and cash is actually pretty inconvenient in the US due to odd-even pricing tactics giving everyone pockets full of small coins.
Most people would agree that the most intelligent way to use a credit card is to treat it as a debit card and never incur a balance. Instead, you'd pay each month's bill in full. This way, you pay no interest on your debt; in fact, you are effectively incurring zero debt. Moreover, a lot of credit cards offer rewards programs in terms of cash back or "points" as a percentage of your expenditures. With some mixing and matching of cards, you can easily get 2-3% cash back on your aggregate purchases, or rack up some free airline flights.
I actually find this to be a huge moral gray area; the reason that Visa, Discover, and MasterCard can afford to pay out handsome rewards is partly because of the financially illiterate charging more to their credit cards than they can afford to pay off. [1] I don't have the exact numbers on me, but I think interest versus merchant fees was about a 67%-33% split in terms of credit card company revenue. (American Express is an exception because they do not allow you to carry a balance on a lot of their cards; they will report your account as delinquent and terminate service.)
Otherwise, as other posters have mentioned, credit cards offer fraud protection. Cards aimed at people with good credit scores often come with other nice benefits, such as additional reimbursement if an airline loses your bag.
[1] There are valid reasons to place a huge charge that you can't afford to pay off immediately. Emergencies do happen, for instance, and it's really great to have a line of credit for that situation. But then your credit card serves the same purpose as a traditional loan.
> I actually find this to be a huge moral gray area; the reason that Visa, Discover, and MasterCard can afford to pay out handsome rewards is partly because of the financially illiterate charging more to their credit cards than they can afford to pay off
That's entirely false. The credit card business model (including rewards) does not depend on debt. Rewards are a fee passed from the merchant to the consumer via the credit card.
As you pointed out, American Express doesn't depend on this at all. Most of their best cards aren't even credit cards.
Also, if credit companies love debtors so much that their business depends on it, why do they court people with good credit so aggressively?
> but I think interest versus merchant fees was about a 67%-33% split in terms of credit card company revenue. (American Express is an exception because they do not allow you to carry a balance on a lot of their cards; they will report your account as delinquent and terminate service
That's correct. Depending on the issuer, it tends to be around 70% interest revenue. Pretty much all of their profit comes from this though! Amex does allow you to carry a balance but their ratio is opposite of others 30/70%.
> Amex does allow you to carry a balance but their ratio is opposite of others 30/70%.
Ah yes, you're correct; thanks for reminding me. Their (arguably) more well-known cards (Green, Gold, Platinum, and Black) are actually charge cards. I think you're able to explicitly mark a an item you've purchased as something you'd like to pay for over time, but otherwise you are required to pay in full on those cards. The rest are true credit cards, such as Blue and SPG.
