The episode hits on exactly what Hoffman, Hilbe, and Nowak describe in their paper. “Donations are never fully anonymous,” they write. “These donations are often revealed to the recipient, the inner circle of friends or fellow do-gooders,” and these “few privy observers, in turn, do not only learn that the donor is generous” but are “also likely to infer that the generosity was not motivated by immediate fame or the desire for recognition from the masses…”—exactly what everyone seemed to figure was true of David, to his chagrin.
What’s intriguing about anonymous giving, and other behaviors apparently designed to obscure good traits and acts, like modesty, is that it’s “hard to reconcile with standard evolutionary accounts of pro-social behavior,” the researchers write. Donations fall under a form of cooperation called “indirect reciprocity.”
http://nautil.us/blog/larry-david-and-the-game-theory-of-anonymous-donations
On the Model 3 body line on a Tuesday afternoon in early June, everything is still. Tesla Inc. is just coming off a week of downtime during which workers added a new production line, improved ventilation after a fire in the paint shop, and overhauled machines across the factory. But even after the changes, there are kinks to work out.
Suddenly, dozens of robots snap into frenzied action, picking up door panels, welding window pillars, taking measurements, and on and on. This robotic dance is a visceral representation of what Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has dubbed “Alien Dreadnought,” a code name for the factory that evokes an early 20th century warship, but with extraterrestrials.
Tesla says there isn’t any single problem slowing production down now. Instead, the heavy reliance on automation and new production methods have created a galaxy of smaller problems that must each be addressed individually. Musk’s claim is that once the process is tuned, the company will set a new standard for speed, precision, and scalability in manufacturing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-08/tesla-model-3-photos-of-elon-musk-s-factory-in-fremont
Croatia is about half as rich as Denmark (per capita GDP around $25,000 PPP-adjusted). But Croatia, or at least one very small part of it, used to be much richer: what is now Dubrovnik, and what was then (usually) called Ragusa, was once a little Mediterranean Singapore. In contrast to Denmark, Ragusa was a small trading port and a city-state, and its elite was a trading elite. What kind of elite would one want in a trading port? In an age where long-distance trade was dangerous and uncertain, anyone who controlled a vital route could extract rents.
What this suggests to me is that the value of institutions over endowments has been somewhat overplayed in the recent economic literature. To be sure, ‘institutions’ (in this instance, the characteristics of political elite) can be more or less appropriate to a particular endowment of the factors of production (broadly conceived), and to the historical circumstances. If Britain had not specialised in manufactures in the nineteenth century—and hence begun to import butter from Denmark—then the demand for a butter export industry may not have been sufficient for Denmark’s excellent institutions to matter all that much
http://decompressinghistory.com/post/croatia-vs-denmark/
“The first word out of everybody’s mouths in meetings is, ‘How do we deal with Netflix?’ ” says one longtime TV-industry executive. “‘How do we compete with Netflix? What are they doing?’ ” Disney’s pending purchase of much of 20th Century Fox’s film and TV assets — which has prompted a counterbid by Comcast, parent company of NBCUniversal — is in no small part a reaction to the rise of Netflix.
Mysterious though it may seem, Netflix operates by a simple logic, long understood by such tech behemoths as Facebook and Amazon: Growth begets more growth begets more growth. When Netflix adds more content, it lures new subscribers and gets existing ones to watch more hours of Netflix. As they spend more time watching, the company can collect more data on their viewing habits, allowing it to refine its bets about future programming. “More shows, more watching; more watching, more subs; more subs, more revenue; more revenue, more content,” explains Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer.
Netflix doesn’t necessarily care if you binge-watch an entire season of a show within a couple days of it launching. “We’re not trying to encourage that,” Sarandos says. “The completion of a single episode is a more important trigger. We wouldn’t be looking at, ‘Are people plowing through it in the first weekend?,’ because the number of people who do that is pretty slim.” But one metric I heard repeatedly during my visits to Netflix was 28-day viewership — basically how many people completed a full season of a show within the first four weeks it’s on the service. Sarandos also tells me the company looks at which shows new subscribers watch first: It lets them know if a show is driving people to sign up for Netflix.
“When we are not growing the subscriber base or hours of engagement per subscriber,” he says. “When you start seeing them plateau, then you say there’s a point of diminishing returns on the continued expansion of the library. But we are not seeing any evidence in either metric yet.” Sarandos also points out that while Netflix users are spending more time watching the service than ever, it’s still “a very small portion” of the overall amount of time we spend on our TVs and cell phones. “There’s tons of growth in user screen time on Netflix,” he says. “If you think about the addressable market for Netflix as being paid TV households, it’s relatively small. Everyone with a phone has a screen and access to the internet. That is our addressable market. The world’s taste, and the world’s time, is what we’re after.”
http://www.vulture.com/2018/06/how-netflix-swallowed-tv-industry.html
On the Model 3 body line on a Tuesday afternoon in early June, everything is still. Tesla Inc. is just coming off a week of downtime during which workers added a new production line, improved ventilation after a fire in the paint shop, and overhauled machines across the factory. But even after the changes, there are kinks to work out.
Suddenly, dozens of robots snap into frenzied action, picking up door panels, welding window pillars, taking measurements, and on and on. This robotic dance is a visceral representation of what Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has dubbed “Alien Dreadnought,” a code name for the factory that evokes an early 20th century warship, but with extraterrestrials.
Tesla says there isn’t any single problem slowing production down now. Instead, the heavy reliance on automation and new production methods have created a galaxy of smaller problems that must each be addressed individually. Musk’s claim is that once the process is tuned, the company will set a new standard for speed, precision, and scalability in manufacturing.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-08/tesla-model-3-photos-of-elon-musk-s-factory-in-fremont
Croatia is about half as rich as Denmark (per capita GDP around $25,000 PPP-adjusted). But Croatia, or at least one very small part of it, used to be much richer: what is now Dubrovnik, and what was then (usually) called Ragusa, was once a little Mediterranean Singapore. In contrast to Denmark, Ragusa was a small trading port and a city-state, and its elite was a trading elite. What kind of elite would one want in a trading port? In an age where long-distance trade was dangerous and uncertain, anyone who controlled a vital route could extract rents.
What this suggests to me is that the value of institutions over endowments has been somewhat overplayed in the recent economic literature. To be sure, ‘institutions’ (in this instance, the characteristics of political elite) can be more or less appropriate to a particular endowment of the factors of production (broadly conceived), and to the historical circumstances. If Britain had not specialised in manufactures in the nineteenth century—and hence begun to import butter from Denmark—then the demand for a butter export industry may not have been sufficient for Denmark’s excellent institutions to matter all that much
http://decompressinghistory.com/post/croatia-vs-denmark/
“The first word out of everybody’s mouths in meetings is, ‘How do we deal with Netflix?’ ” says one longtime TV-industry executive. “‘How do we compete with Netflix? What are they doing?’ ” Disney’s pending purchase of much of 20th Century Fox’s film and TV assets — which has prompted a counterbid by Comcast, parent company of NBCUniversal — is in no small part a reaction to the rise of Netflix.
Mysterious though it may seem, Netflix operates by a simple logic, long understood by such tech behemoths as Facebook and Amazon: Growth begets more growth begets more growth. When Netflix adds more content, it lures new subscribers and gets existing ones to watch more hours of Netflix. As they spend more time watching, the company can collect more data on their viewing habits, allowing it to refine its bets about future programming. “More shows, more watching; more watching, more subs; more subs, more revenue; more revenue, more content,” explains Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer.
Netflix doesn’t necessarily care if you binge-watch an entire season of a show within a couple days of it launching. “We’re not trying to encourage that,” Sarandos says. “The completion of a single episode is a more important trigger. We wouldn’t be looking at, ‘Are people plowing through it in the first weekend?,’ because the number of people who do that is pretty slim.” But one metric I heard repeatedly during my visits to Netflix was 28-day viewership — basically how many people completed a full season of a show within the first four weeks it’s on the service. Sarandos also tells me the company looks at which shows new subscribers watch first: It lets them know if a show is driving people to sign up for Netflix.
“When we are not growing the subscriber base or hours of engagement per subscriber,” he says. “When you start seeing them plateau, then you say there’s a point of diminishing returns on the continued expansion of the library. But we are not seeing any evidence in either metric yet.” Sarandos also points out that while Netflix users are spending more time watching the service than ever, it’s still “a very small portion” of the overall amount of time we spend on our TVs and cell phones. “There’s tons of growth in user screen time on Netflix,” he says. “If you think about the addressable market for Netflix as being paid TV households, it’s relatively small. Everyone with a phone has a screen and access to the internet. That is our addressable market. The world’s taste, and the world’s time, is what we’re after.”
http://www.vulture.com/2018/06/how-netflix-swallowed-tv-industry.html
