I kind of wonder if a group of companies could create a kind of private currency that would be represented as a store credit, say Amazon, Google Play and maybe Alibaba (to pick 3).

They could denominate it in dollars and provide incentives to customers and vendors to accept some of their income or refunds at a dollar premium in private currency as well as making it transferrable to other people (using a cryptocurrency model, maybe) as well as being portable to other core vendors. They could even offer to process transactions for other web site that wanted to be able to accept it.

They might even save operating expenses if it became widespread enough that it allowed them to reduce currency exchange issues. A combination of Amazon, Google and whoever would also probably be deep-pocketed enough that there wouldn't be much risk of the credits being defaulted on.

I think there's a lot of truth to that.

Even figuring out how the company "works" and how to work within its systems can be time consuming and lead to a lot of inefficiency for employees. This is obvious in large companies with many systems, departments, people and sometimes even space.

It's less obvious in small companies like the one I work in, but as a small company with only 10 years history we are terrible about processes and our own domain knowledge. New employees are often in the dark about a lot of things and aren't effective until they have figured out a lot of information on their own, the hard way.

It's not a complete solution, but it should be possible to ameliorate this sort of problem by making assimilation a more attractive option for immigrants, or segregation a less attractive option.

The left's embrace of multiculturalism has made such a solution politically impossible.

But we have our own internal issues that make a lot of this difficult. We could be much more strict about enforcing secularism in public education, barring the display of religious symbols and restrictive dress and refuse to allow prayer in our schools. Trouble is, our own religionists in the US are so busy trying to put religion back in school they would never support this.

We also have a fair body of case law that prohibits religious discrimination at workplaces and generally forces employers to allow religious clothing and some types of religious activity at work.

I also think that enforcing an official language would help, too. If you can't take your religion to school or work and the only way you can interact with the government is in English you have a lot of motivation to assimilate. If you don't at that point, I guess you're everything I want in a fellow citizen -- someone who supports themselves, stays out of government and keeps their religion to themselves.

"seem to". Christianity is a whole lot less homogenized than Islam, which itself does have distinctions.

The funny thing with Islam is that it is, AFAIK, less centralized than Christianity, whose primary denominations (at least by membership) tend to belong to larger governing bodies who control doctrine, ordination, such as the Catholic church, the Lutheran synods, the Anglican Communion, and the branches of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Despite it's apparent schismatic nature, Christianity has a lot of central authority even if it is weak authority.

Islam as a religion doesn't have any central structure like this, excepting within Islamic states where it is controlled by the government or organized within a given nation. There's no central authority that ordains Imams or is able to establish an orthodoxy, This has been one of the major problems with Islamic Fundamentalism -- you can't go to the Islamic pope and say tone it down. Anybody can grow a beard, grab a Koran, claim to be an Imam and try to be more conservative than the guy next door who he labels an infidel.

  Most so-called Christians aren't particularly religious,

And this is largely what makes Christianity in many ways more compatible with secular modernism -- the dominant flavors available don't lay outright claim to civil governance. Unlike Islamic upheavals, the 30 Years' War was settled with the Peace of Westphalia which established an idea of non-interference in other states' internal affairs, putting an end to the imposition of pan-state Catholic meddling in national affairs and in effect greatly curtailing theocratric governance in the Christian world.

Christian belief tends to be more personal and its edicts begin -- and end -- with its members, and they don't really have explicit civil authority. The Islamic world still is invested in notions of theocratic governance -- there isn't civil law and religious law, there is only one body of law, Sharia. I think one thing that frustrates Muslims is this lack of enshrinement of their religious beliefs in civil law.

Which is why I said "sense of powerlessness" -- I don't know that anyone is ever totally powerless, outside of maybe some kind of prison inmate in a 24-hour solitary confnement situation.

Obviously a member of a more or less free society can project physical power through some kind of violence (guns, bombs, going batshit nuts with a knife in a crowd, even).

But the belief that one lacks the kind of conceptual power to shape their future or influence their larger environment is what I was getting at. And usually the greater the perceived sense of powerlessness, the more over the top the physical response usually is.

The problem with talking about the actual power of "the Muslims" (a fraught concept in and of itself) is that in most ways of looking at it, relative to the West, the Muslims power seems pretty small, politically, militarily, and perhaps even culturally and ideologically.

It strikes me that most flavors of Islam are ideologically and culturally non-competitive with secularized cultures through their rejection of forms of social organization and interaction that limit their ability to adapt or innovate. As one example, suppressing women seems to cut off half your source of economic power, intellectual innovation and inhibits social values that even traditionally patriarchical cultures like Christianity seem to have embraced.

What if one of the "core issues" is a substantial difference in cultural values?

Immigrants show up with cultural values completely at odds with the dominant culture and move into self-isolated communities. The dominant culture rejects the immigrants' value system, which combined with the isolation of a separate community, seems to contribute to the sense of alienation and powerlessness. Some, rather than choosing assimilation, instead choose a kind of victim mindset, seeing the rejection of their values as a kind of active oppression and become ripe for radicalization.

None of this is to say that the dominant culture may have in fact engaged in some actual good old-fashioned discrimination, but labeling all of the dominant cultures rejection of the immigrant's culture seems wrong when things like separation of religion and state, women's equality or concepts like blasphemy are in play.

I just don't know how you "fix" conflicts like this.

After a lot of widespread adoption, is bitcoin considered more or less perfect, or are there weaknesses or problems that should be changed/rethought? Not just software wise, but maybe in terms of assumptions like the maximum number of coins that can be minted or the nature of the blockchain network, etc.

I always wonder how you "improved" a cryptocurrency once it gained some widespread adoption? It seems like network effects and investment would make it kind of easy for an alternate currency that appears "good enough" for initial investors to get somewhat established would be impossible to fix or migrate off of, short of a panic situation where some serious flaw causes holders to be forced to dump it for something else.

Most new cryptocurrencies seem to be either just clones of bitcoin or pump and dump schemes where it's pre-mined for get-rick-quick promoters (or at least they get labeled as such). But those invested in an established one like bitcoin could also be seen as working their own vested interests, be they financial or otherwise, and either ignoring weaknesses or badmouthing potential competitors because they are invested in it.

I'm sure the former is more true than the latter, which is why I'm curious if bitcoin is as good as it can get or if after a period of adoption if there are things that could/should have been done differently.

It's not just commissions. If you can automate away the process you can eliminate a shit ton of people, too, and that's where the costs are. I'll bet a lot of those commissions are in commercial insurance policies and those kinds of policies will still probably be sold by sales people who earn a commission.

Part of me is like, yay, insurance is expensive and it would be nice to pay less for it, and why shouldn't you in theory be able to just find policies via the web?

But part of me is like, ugh, every time some genius decides an industry is ripe for disruption what they end up meaning is they want to shitcan a bunch of employees and pocket the money that was otherwise filtering through the economy and keeping at least SOME people middle class.

It doesn't seem like anyone actually wants to change the business model of insurance -- ie, I pay money in case something bad were to happen and in theory the policy covers my liabilities. I don't know how you "disrupt" the basic structure of that business.

It's just the race to the bottom all over again.

Nuff sed.

Organized human civilization has been around, what, 10,000 years? How do you suppose bands of humans dealt with some new group that showed up and wanted their fishing spot or their hunting spot or women? Pretty much everyone had some stake in the outcome and hiring a "conflict resolution facilitator" wasn't really an option.

Even a lot of Roman military activity up to about the Marian era wasn't necessarily expansionist but considered defensive against various Gallic and Germanic tribes who made incursions into Roman areas. The Romans were seriously concerned about the risk to Rome itself from these tribes it was several serious defeats that led to changes in the organization and makeup of the Roman legions known as the Marian Reforms. Prior to those reforms, poor citizens couldn't even join the army.

Plus I'd argue that most of your arguments really boil down to economics or economic pressure on existing civilizations even if some of the rationale seems explainable by religious or ideological motivations. It seems unlikely that pure political ideology was any kind of motivating factor until late in the 19th century.

Because this one system is just soooo cool, and there are no others out there like it.

Well, you could say that about the Middle East vs. the Gobi Desert -- because that ONE patch of sand has something and no others out there are like it.

As it turns out, some patches of sand in the Middle East turn out to actually have something no others out there like it have and that something (oil) turns out to be hugely important for managing and maintaining your inter(steller)national empire.

Who's to say the same wouldn't apply to outer space? Maybe there's some unobtainium material out there that just turns out to be very rare AND very useful either to interstellar space travel or use on some home planet. It's not like it's not a recurring theme in tons of scifi books, from the "spice" in Dune to dilithium in Star Trek.

It might be a fair argument to make that interstellar travel presupposes the ability to produce useful energy in unlimited quantities and mastery of such energy production also presupposes the ability to create materials and refine raw materials on a virtually limitless basis.

OK, but we really don't yet know what kind of materials make this energy harnessing possible and maybe those materials don't exist with some uniform distribution or in the quantities necessary for interstellar travel, making acquiring such materials or elements critical for maintaining an interstellar civilization and hence making it necessary to use military force to maintain supplies.

I'm not sure anything's a fair comparison with an HBO series, mini or otherwise. HBO programming has a staggering production quality whose peers really are only big-budget Hollywood movies.

Most TV series (other than HBO) have simpler production values all around, from costumes to sets to location shooting and generally even to cast sizes and extras. This makes them cheaper but I would also guess makes them faster to shoot, since as the AD is fond of yelling, "Time is money people!"

I suppose Amazon and Netflix are consciously trying to conflate their unique programs with HBO's, but other than what seems like extensive location shooting in House of Cards, most seem fairly conventional in terms of production standards.

Maybe the earnings call will go something like this:

ANALYST: How much loss do you attribute to the totally failing Fire Phone?

AMAZON: WOW! We're going to produce a dozen movies! It'll be awesome!

I keep hearing this said, but that wasn't my impression nor does it seem especially fair after ONE episode.

The genre it seems to belong to has a pretty low bar for entry -- Fringe was like 5 seasons, and having begun watching it recently I'm already kind of tired of it. It follows such a set formula I feel like *I* could write episodes for it -- new fringey event, nutty professor solves puzzle with application of physics, medicine and biology with a little help from moody Fed Boss and ActionGirl, last 3 minutes of show, ambiguously advance "conspiracy".

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Really, The After couldn't have been so much worse than this, Revolution, Falling Skies, etc etc.

Transparent won a couple of Golden Globes, but "Bosch" hasn't started streaming yet and Chris Carter's "The After" mysteriously got cancelled almost a year after it was a winner in the same pilot voting "election" as Bosch.

I think someone trying to reinvent the "system" of creating filmed content is laudable and worthwhile, I'm just curious if Amazon really has put more thought into this than "vertical integration" and assuming that whatever insight they have into package delivery logistics and cloud computing is somehow universally applicable to something like film/tv production. They wouldn't be the first "geniuses" to take hubris to a new level only to discover that doing A well means nothing when it comes to doing B well. We see plenty of that when A and B aren't all that different.

I think faster (and more complete) turnaround of announced content would definitely help, I also wonder if it would make sense to rethink some of the streaming assumptions -- like, why straightjacket yourself into the one hour episode format? Why not two hour episodes, but fewer of them? Does the entire series have to available all at once, or could faster release cycles from pilots to episodes be accomplished by releasing a group of episodes every 60-90 days to allow for simultaneous shooting and releases?

  Should they dilute their resources producing a bunch of one-hour pilots, or should they be a little more discriminating and look at a pilot instead as a more complete story arc and make 3 episodes? That way even failures that didn't become series could at least be watchable, self-contained miniseries adding value to the catalog instead of just becoming trivial ephemera? Maybe the desire to make more typical "movies" is part of this.