Prodigy launched online ads from the 1980s. AOL as well.
HotWired (Wired's first online venture) sold their first banner ads in 1994.
DoubleClick was founded in 1995.
Neither were limited to 90's hardware:
Web browsers were available for machines like the Amiga, launched in 1985, and today you can find people who have made simple browsers run on 8-bit home computers like the C64.
I love exposed everything in construction. Every plumbing and electrical problem that required me to call someone involved the thing being hidden for aesthetic reasons.
I'm currently in an old house in Vietnam and I had to add exposed PVC piping to route around a leak inside a wall that was also feeding mold.
Half of the work involved each time I call someone is understanding the hidden stuff + getting stuff out of the way to see the hidden stuff.
"Engineering types" have built much of the world most of us actually live in. Yet a core piece of engineering——maintainability——is pathologically persistent.
My dad, who has been a carpenter for over 50 years used to rail against boxing in pipes.
"Once upon a time people were just glad to have running water, now it has to arrive by magic"
In his house there is a duct behind the skirting boards upstairs. You can fish a wire to most places from there.
His other pet hate was glued down cupboard flooring. Squeaky floors were a common complaint in new houses. It was normally caused by not levelling the first floor joists properly (levelling the tops is the correct way), and just dropping them on the walls. The solution industry came up with was to glue the tounges and grooves together, and later to glue the boards to the joists as well. This is a big problem if you need to take up the floor for a leaking pipe. Whereas before you just cut the tongue of a board with a circular saw, pulled it up, and put a noggin under the joint, now you have to destroy a board, and try and buy a similar one
IME, on GitHub (or the other major public repo services), it's far more likely than not that I can pull up an old version of a project from 10 years ago if I want to experiment with it. (In case other old things used it as a dependency, I really want to reproduce an old result, etc.)
On the vast majority of other distribution platforms, it's at best a 50/50 as to whether (a) the platform still exists with any of its contents, and (b) the authors haven't wiped all the old versions to clear up space or whatever. The former typically fails on academic personal websites (which generally get dumped within 5-15 years), and the latter typically fails on SourceForge-style sites.
That is to say, I am not a big fan of the popular alternatives to Git repos as a distribution method.
I never considered how a street with lots of cool shops could create value for homeowners and commercial real estate owners without necessarily creating value for the businesses that were responsible for making it cool.
I don't think that any of the suggested solutions would work, as they all involve the government and taxation - which can only destroy value, IMHO.
Creating a cool vibe certainly has value and can contribute to price appreciation in the community, but ultimately capitalism is not based upon creating vibe but upon selling products and services.
One of the stronger arguments for LVT is that land is inherently inelastic, and thus taxing it doesn't create inefficiency (deadweight loss).
Other taxes like sales tax destroy value because they create a deadweight loss by preventing transactions that would otherwise occur. Land supply is constant, so LVT is purely a wealth transfer, and does not create inefficiencies.
It seems like a reach to say that taxation inherently destroys value. For example, in my country I think universal education, roads, universal healthcare, and border control probably all provide value in excess of their cost, and no one has proven a method of funding those things other than taxation. I guess “value” is a subjective idea, though.
I think the argument is that governments don't fund public goods through taxes but through issuing currency, while taxes guarantee a demand for currency and prevent its devaluation. Hence the 'function' of taxes really is to 'destroy' money to prevent oversupply.
Not sure I disagree, though of course that's not how the system works formally.
I don’t completely follow the logic yet. If the government stopped collecting taxes, they could only fund services by taking on ever-increasing debt, right? It’s not like money created by central banks just goes straight into the government’s income.
>as they all involve the government and taxation - which can only destroy value, IMHO.
My government and taxation provides the police, the courts, the schools, the roads, the sewers, the power, etc. Seems like a little bit of a value add.
I think you've misread the OP's point. It's not that the government doesn't provide the police (although it doesn't - the taxpayer pays for the police and staffs it). It's that government policies and regulations to try and change fundamental market forces create extremely obvious problems, although they aren't always obvious to the myopic voter.
You’re very close to asking whether capitalism leads to the best quality of life, if you think of quality as going beyond the availability of products and services.
People who grew up in Soviet-era poverty of course see this differently than comfortable middle class people who feel alienated by soulless suburbia.
I think the article could be read as a way to reconcile the two.
Value creation not captured is the definition of a positive externality, and landlords being able to extract that value despite not creating them is an example of rent seeking. Aiming to address these does not somehow question capitalism.
The propagation time is the interesting part. Critical slowing down was in physics textbooks by the 1970s. Ecology didn't import it until 2003 — via a chance conversation at a conference bar. Cardiology took until the 1990s. The FDA approved the resulting cardiac test in 2001.
That's not normal diffusion. Those are 30-year gaps for math with direct life-safety applications. The paper asks why, and finds structural explanations in how we organize knowledge.
Do you consider the possibility that the knowledge was intentionally suppressed, the seed poisoned, or Ego driven suppression? Simply looking at things clinically can obscure intentional deception, to slow progress. The concept is called an information hazard.
Consider during the cold war, that the U.S. created fake nuclear designs, then allowed them to fall into the hands of the KGB. The KGB and Russian nuclear engineers then wasted significant time trying to build nuclear devices that failed to work, and could have been dangerous.
I think that unlike physical art, there aren't actually enough people who recognize or even care about your craft. Sure the codebase is super maintainable and that half-pixel line ties things up beautifully, but nobody cares other than your peers. Your peers won't give you a salary.
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