At around the 700 mark, the probability is > 0.5. So if you are in a crowd of 700+ people, someone's likely sick. Of course, you need to have some reasonable estimate of how many are carrying the virus in a given population to do this calculation.
You are absolutely right on the fees being a problem here. I opened a wealthfront account a couple of years ago and added some money because I really liked the interface and I was sold on tax loss harvesting. I recently wanted to compare how my wealthfront account did compared to the S&P500 and I was surprised to see a 0.98 beta (almost the same monthly returns as S&P500) and an alpha of (-0.15 almost the fees they are charging) with very little r-squared error. Atleast for my risk profile (10), I would have been better off investing directly in S&P500. I didn't get high returns nor did I get reduced volatility with the wealthfront portfolio.
Even more likely - hiring comes to a screeching halt. That's what brings the rental market down. There are a lot of new apartments being added to the market and bam, oversupply of rental units if the hiring slows down or stops.
The statistic that stood out for me was the drop in the fraction of labor that are women. This is also true for China in the last couple of decades, admittedly from a much higher level.
Anecdotally, I hear from business people in India that hiring is very tough at all levels and there are simply not enough qualified people available. How does that square with declining participation of women? Perhaps the increased wealth is making all of the labor in the lower rung drop out of bad jobs? Is this statistic reliable to begin with?
This wasn't really a focus of this article but I wish it was.
That statistic may not be accurate, as more and more women have been entering workforce for the past 2 decades in India. However most such jobs, such as working as a maid or cook at some one else's house, may not be documented and hence probably doesn't figure into the statistic.
It's all too easy to ignore the admonition to maintain good posture when you are young. I can speak from experience that our back doesn't forgive that mistake and it's very hard to make it forget.
I wish that article had more practical advice in addition to re-iterating the horrors of bad posture though.
Careful about that though. If you have typical computer-user posture, you'll often have a weak back and tight chest muscles. If you jump into bench pressing (as everyone does) without correcting the imbalance, you can make it worse. Essentially I'm saying a big yes to weight-training, but beyond learning the basics of how to lift, your initial focus should be correcting any existing postural issues, ideally after talking to a physio about it.
And start with an empty bar and increase slowly. A lot of people let their ego get in the way and load up the bar their first times and try to force lifts way too heavy. Not only is that bad because of the load, but starting light gives you time to actually learn the lifts while the weight on the bar is light enough to maintain proper form.
For my part it was the squat that was a major issue - too tight hips is another typical "computer-user" problem. Some basic stretches for the hips and taking it slower fixed that very quickly, but I wasted lots of time before I realised what the problem was.
Absolutely! One must learn proper technique of squats (low bar back squats specifically), deadlift, press and bench press. It is enough for start. Find a good training plan (I like Mark Rippetoe's but there are other great ones) and start training 3 times a week. After 6-8 months you'll look at your past, weak self with utmost disguise and your future strong self with admiration :)
This doesn't square with the report that says they are looking at manufacturing processes and materials. I agree with you though that this is the most likely explanation.
Good points. I doubt if they are aiming at any competition. Their stated goal is to reduce the cost of the hardware for themselves by standardizing it. Their hope is that the other big guys (amazon, google etc) will pick this solution up driving up adoption and lowering the cost. If this happens, Cisco, Juniper et al gets disrupted and that's just a side effect.
I grew up in India as well and I can second this comment. There is something to be said for seeing first hand the effects of a disease.
Speaking from personal experience, my brother developed a bad reaction to a polio vaccine and developed a mild form of polio that eventually went after a year of struggle. That didn't stop my parents from further vaccinations. It was understood that vaccines have side effects but getting the disease would have been far worse.
I worry we need to see an actual measles death here in the US before people start seeing the actual benefit of vaccines in the cost/benefit calculation.
In the middle of last year, Google announced that they will also look at other bay area cities like Santa Clara for Fiber. I don't see what happened to that and there is no more mention of Santa Clara in the latest post. Maybe it fell through? The last update I see is from the city claiming that the discussions have ended - http://siliconvalleypower.com/index.aspx?recordid=3191&page=...
I doubt if reducing cost can be the only factor. Broadcom chips are going to be pretty much the lowest cost ones because of their scale. It's more likely that they are dreaming up some network architecture that isn't served well by existing solutions.
By lowest cost I didn't mean the actual cost of the chips but the cost of the whole architecture. As you point out, the best solution might require chips that can't be found off the shelf.
I guess the metric they're trying to optimize is cost/performance/watt or something like that.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+%281-%280.999%29%...
At around the 700 mark, the probability is > 0.5. So if you are in a crowd of 700+ people, someone's likely sick. Of course, you need to have some reasonable estimate of how many are carrying the virus in a given population to do this calculation.