Just as a matter of principle, now that 3 years have passed, could I ask if your laundromat entrepreneur friend did in fact manage to make 10-50 times purchase price by repackaging the collection of privately owned laundromats?
When I first read this essay that struck me more as optimistic bluster than a realistic outcome, but it would be very interesting (and a helpful update!) to know what the outcome actually was.
Loved the essay; had a surprisingly negative emotional response to seeing what feels like unnecessary cruelty to poetry at the end though!
The act of taking someone else's poem, changing a mere three words of it (in a way that is both unnecessary and aesthetically detrimental) and then crediting oneself as the author feels icky.
Would the unbastardised verse from Invictus by Henley himself not have worked here?
"It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul."
It's less about the tuning of the piano itself than the knock on effect it has on the pianist. Even if the audience can barely tell the difference, the pianist themself certainly could, as could the conductor!
Tuning the instrument may well have had a large effect on the audience's experience overall, because the pianist will play much better on an instrument they enjoy playing - it's a totally different experience hearing someone perform while they're enjoying their own art, vs someone who's distracted by an annoying F# that sounds slightly off in every scale.
How did this system actually track calories? Detecting that the user is consuming food seems like a fairly solvable problem; tracking what they're eating - which is going to have order-of-magnitude effects on caloric intake - seems like a much harder problem.
I can't seen any obvious ways to do it, other than by requiring significant user input, and that would rather negate any benefits that a passive, low effort tracker had.
Am I missing something here?
(Was it a "beep to remind you not to snack" device, rather than a calorie tracker?)
This feels like a good example of the exact point being made by the essay.
The rise to power of populist politicians and the historic presence of violent revolutions could be a strong counterpoint to your assertion. Yes, sometimes it feels like democracies are the underdog when stacked up against powerful lobbyists, but ultimately there's a big power imbalance here that the elites are absolutely correct to fear: lobbyists are absolutely dependent on democratic institutions to leverage their wealth into political power, while 50,000 angry people with pitchforks are not. When the mob, or a mob empowered leader, decides to bypass democratic institutions in the exercise of power, this asymmetry matters.
Whether or not the revolting populace actual get what they want out of rebelling (historically this would be unexpected) it's a difficult case to make that they don't have some significant advantages in the games elites actually care about.