"$600 CAD/month for a bedroom in a house that's close to frequent transit and in a low-crime area isn't hard to find if you don't have your heart set on living right in downtown Vancouver."
(Has not looked for an apartment in Vancouver in the last 10 years)
600 a month for a bedroom is definitely doable... I found two <$500/month vacancies within a year of moving to the vancouver area in 2014.. One was in Burnaby near SFU and the other was a steal in the commercial drive area with the catch of having a roommate who filled up the living room with bike parts.
You're right that it's not easy to come by though, and if you want to live within a 30 minute transit commute of downtown and have a single bedroom, it's unlikely you'll find anything for less than $750 that's not an SRO
>the deletions and insertions in track are just as visually simple as on paper
This really is an aesthetic claim you're making, and it goes against what many in publishing feel, which is that substantial edits through track changes are clearly more taxing, less comfortable, less intuitive and uglier than paper.
You're also confusing collaboration problems with editorial workflow problems. The author is writing from a copy editor's standpoint, which involves producing clean, professional quality copy through a vertical, step-by-step editorial process.
Under certain circumstances, often involving human suffering or vulnerability, demand based pricing becomes price gouging. Uber's actions here look like price gouging. It's all very simple.
Everyone defending Uber here seems to be either deploying the 'where do we draw the line' fallacy, or claiming that there's no such thing as price gouging.
If you want to defend Uber, you need to show me why what they did isn't price gouging. Or you need to show me that price gouging doesn't exist.
More blather. Its irrelevant whatever you choose to call the phenomenon. The fundamental problem is scarcity of goods and services. Its a shortage of fuel, water, food and other goods the delivery of which won't be carried out because you have determined that raising prices is morally bad. Prices are a signaling mechanism. You focus only on the nominal price and its supposed "profit-mongering" by the suppliers, but it signals where demand exists and for tankers/suppliers to deliver the goods where the demand is highest. Or you can stand in the street corner calling the suppliers immoral and demand that the cops arrest them for price gouging. Great! But you won't get your ice/fuel/water. Good luck.
So, really, an opportunity is a tested idea. I completely agree.
It's hard to come up with an idea without at least some intuitive sense of what kind of need/desire its fulfilling. I think people deceive themselves here because they have a naturally inflated sense of how great their ideas are.
To use your phrasing: people think their idea is great enough to require very little testing to become an opportunity - their intuitive sense of how great their idea is is enough to begin immediately calling it an opportunity.
Well, another way to put it is that you come up with ideas and only others can validate them into opportunities. You can't turn an idea into an opportunity. The market, your customers, determine if there's an opportunity in it somewhere.
But I'll reiterate what I said about opportunities: The can and do exist in the complete absence of ideas.
The value is in opportunities. There are people who would love to steal your opportunities. They don't give a shit about your ideas. That's too much work. They want you to hand-feed them the juicy opportunities. It's almost like the difference between R&D and just "D". The first is hard. Once the "R" is done, the "D" tends to be a lot easier to execute brilliantly.
I have a database of probably about 600 ideas accumulated over time. Most are probably crap. No market opportunity. I am in the habit of logging ideas without passing any judgement at the time they are generated. Why? The Pet Rock. As my wife likes to remind me, I am to fucking smart to have ever considered the idea of selling rocks as pets in a little box. And she is right. So I try to not judge ideas until I really take the time to evaluate whether or not an opportunity exists.
As I navigate through my idea database and start testing them I start to discover the ones that might represent real opportunities and focus on them.
Sometimes opportunities require a lot of work to validate. An example of this are most iPhone apps today. You get two days, maybe three in the "New" list under your category and then it's a quick trip to page 253. Invisible. Gone.
Does that mean that there is no opportunity in application x based on idea y? Not necessarily. Having an app published on the app store is not validation, it just means that your app is now available for others to see, if you can get them there. In order to validate the idea you have to now do the legwork to create awareness and bring people to your app. Only after a real effort to get hundreds or thousands of people to have a look can you honestly say if your idea for an app that does x represents a real market opportunity. Some get lucky and take off on day one. Hardly the norm, of course.
This, BTW, as a developer, is one of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with people who approach you with app ideas. They don't understand that thinking that something is great doesn't mean that a million people are going to run to buy it.
A case in point is this guy who approached me about doing yet another storybook for kids. There's a million of them out there. Great idea right? The market opportunity is certainly validated. Right? Lots of people buying them. Right? Well, no. Not really.
The other element of this that hasn't been discussed is barrier to entry or barrier to market penetration. Sure, you can come up with a new series of children storybooks with great art, voicing, interactivity and music. The idea and the opportunity are identified and validated. The problem is that it will cost a bundle in marketing to unseat the top ten or top five sellers in that category. An absolute bundle. So, even though a market opportunity exists the idea and the opportunity are nearly worthless unless someone comes in with a truckload of money to make it happen.
When the guy asks me to do the dev work for 10% of the revenue...well, thankfully I can multiply by zero at blinding speed. No thanks. I told him that I'd do it for 25% and a non-refundable revenue advance payment of $50K upfront. He left. That was me using my Jedi powers to have him leave me alone.
I would sprint through a minefield to be on that first boat out. My wallpaper at one point in life was panoramic prints from the Opportunity rover. I wrote Kim Stanley Robinson a fan letter, signed with a chewed up gelly pen. I am utterly delighted.
But the hard part is extremely, extremely, extremely hard. It's not getting there, it's staying there. And scant few people are focusing on what it would actually look like and how it would actually work if we actually sent people offworld, which I very much want to happen. Mars500 needs to be Mars5000000 before this dream is real.
Honestly, if we could airlift people into the Sahel with a real-world replica of what would be going to Mars and they could make it a few years, I could die happy.
I'm not convinced. After all, colonization of far away lands has been done throughout history and in many cases the return trip was as hard as it would be on Mars.
I picture the confinement problem as the most troublesome, but astronauts spend months in orders of magnitude tighter spaces and surviving in relatively good condition.
There's no reason at all you should send untrained people on those first missions and there's also no reason at all not to schedule yearly trips to bring back the people who couldn't stand the pressure.
Now, of course it will be insanely hard, there will be highly complex issues with no apparent solution that will have to be solved via improvisation without the proper means. But humans seem to have done it again and again.
I have to say that I definitely agree with your point--and your writing style is great. Do you happen to have a blog or contribute material to any other website (aside from this one, of course)?
(Has not looked for an apartment in Vancouver in the last 10 years)