Touché.

If you already have a devastating remote hack, why not make a virtue of necessity and just distribute the patch by mass-p0wning all your units in the field and rewriting the affected software? Nothing could go wrong!

Drugs are a huge business; but if you are in it for the cash you would be chasing male pattern baldness, obesity, limp-dick-itis, and other lifestyle problems of people who have money. Vaccines are a perennially under-performing item; and vaccines for diseases that mostly affect the dreadfully poor are even less promising. I assume that there's some Gates Foundation money in it, and Uncle Sam would probably pay for something that would allow troops to operate in malarial hellholes without the drawbacks of today's chemical prophylaxis options; but anyone hoping to get rich would be doing R&D elsewhere.

(In the medium to long term, though, a malaria vaccine might be worth a great deal of money, indirectly. One of the nasty things about malaria is that it doesn't kill too many people; but it weakens and debilitates the infected on a massive scale, so regions where malaria is endemic lose huge amounts of school attendance and labor force participation to malaria, which helps keep them poor.)

There are a variety of efforts(different organizations and programs involved at different times) that do just that. Especially in areas moist enough that you can't just do a 'don't leave stagnant water sitting in containers/gutters/etc' campaign to eliminate much of the mosquito breeding area, bed nets are the low-hanging-fruit in terms of reducing the average number of bites per person, especially when you consider how cheap they are and how long they last unless abused(the insecticide-impregnated ones do eventually turn into normal ones; but are still mechanically effective).

I assume that the vaccine efforts are partially a matter of "Well, I'm an immunologist not a field health/education worker, so what am I best suited to do?", partially a matter of protecting people during the time they aren't in bed; and perhaps also the hope of eventually making a sufficient portion of humans resistant and crashing the population of malaria causing protozoa entirely. P. knowlesi unfortunately has an animal reservoir(some non-human primates); but some of the other common plasmodia don't, so if you could increase resistance enough you might be able to hit the point of substantial additional gains 'for free' as the number of infected mosquitos drops and the population crashes.

Aside from immediate considerations, working on a malaria vaccine probably gets some additional interest because of its greater value(both humanitarian and commercial) if climate change should cause the current range of the disease(mostly ghastly tropical pestholes filled with people who can't afford expensive drugs) into wealthier areas of the world. There may also be a basic-research interest: unlike most pathogens, plasmodia are eukaryotic; so I'm sure that the relevant specialists find all sorts of fascinating differences between the biology of the pathogen/host interaction in malaria vs. that in infections by bacteria or viruses. You aren't going to commercialize a drug on basic research alone; but if you want research to happen it certainly doesn't hurt to be novel and interesting.

My pleasure. I'm always glad to see a discussion take a turn for the better rather than just sliding off the rails. Unfortunately, it seems as though the value of known-inaccurate simplified models is often enough poorly understood that some people treat them as "Haha, your model doesn't happen in real life, therefore Economics Refuted!" and others treat them as though their results can actually be trusted when talking about the real-world situations that they are intended to help analyze.

In this case, perfect information is obviously not happening(if nothing else, you'd be crowned God-Emperor of HR for all eternity if you actually found a way of objectively ranking an employee's expertise with enough precision to justify the difference between their salary and the category average down to the last dollar, or even the nearest $10k in a lot of cases); but it does seem like a pretty decent example of how a situation goes from being substantially not-'free-market'(information is both imperfect and asymmetric, with Google knowing all the salaries and each employee knowing only their salary) to one that is markedly closer to 'free market'(Google knows all the salaries, each employee knows at least a fair number of salaries; and is negotiating from a position of much better price information).

I admit that my initial post was pretty snippy; I get annoyed at the cries of "SOCIALISM!!!", especially now that the Cold War is over, all the 'communist' states have either collapsed or turned into crony-capitalist states of various flavors; and the closest thing you can find to 'socialism' is capitalist countries with comparatively cushy social safety nets; and whoever the AC was pushed my buttons.

That specific annoyance aside, though, I'm actually rather fascinated by how useful(across a wide variety of disciplines) models that we know are false can be, despite their falsehood. They are wrong; but by being wrong in well defined ways that are amenable to (relatively) simple analysis they can be such a good jumping off point for examining the real world and figuring out how it must be different in order to produce the results you see.

I find the 'esport' label irksome, mostly because I've never understood the big deal about watching sports; but if the defining characteristic of 'sport-ness' were physical rigor; coal mining and working in a sweatshop would be major athletic events and they'd force golfers to walk the entire course and carry their own bags.

Gaming is obviously pretty low intensity for most muscles, though the rigor of the mental drill is considerable; and the amount of carpal tunnel and similar injuries are actually alarmingly high.

The alternative would obviously be untenable(either forcing athletes to do without medical care 'for their own protection' or just banning every sickie who needs a drug that might be performance enhancing); but a therapeutic use exemption for psychostimulants is going to make the rule more or less a joke(not that I have a problem with that, personally). Getting a diagnosis for which one of the stimulants is the usual treatment is pretty trivial; and they are cheap, have lots of safety data available, and generally don't raise any red flags among doctors. It depends on where you are, of course; but they might actually be among the few drugs that are easier to get legally than illegally.

Scrabble is only a game about words at fairly low levels of play. If you have two otherwise unprepared people stuck in a room with nothing but scrabble for amusement, yes, the one with the better vocabulary likely has better options. Outside of the amateurs, though, memorization of the approved dictionary(starting with words chosen for good point values, the ability to dispose of letters that are usually tricky to get rid of, and other helpful features; but ideally progressing to all of them) supplants knowledge of the language and the remaining challenge is board control and optimizing the conversion of tiles into points over the course of the game.

There would certainly be additional prep time, even for the unusual characters who are really good at this; but the skills that the game demands for high level play should be transferable to any language(or even a nonsense dictionary) that works reasonably well with representation by a relatively small alphabet.

"Perfect information" is the idealized model. As with any idealized model, economics or otherwise(trajectories with respect to a single point mass in absence of friction, ideal gasses, etc.) it sacrifices real-world attainability for substantial convenience in in building and analyzing the model.

Once you have the idealized model, you have something with which to compare real world outcomes and a basis for studying how and why they deviate from the idealized version. Is it barriers to entry? Asymmetric information? Bounded rationality on the part of some or all actors? That's where the economists who grovel through data come in.

In this case, the point isn't that perfect information is expected of real-world economic happenings; perfect information is not possible in practice. However, 'sharing salary data' is an absolutely textbook example of something that would move the situation from 'very imperfect data' to 'closer to perfect data'. It also likely reduces the asymmetry of information(HQ already knew all the salaries, and possibly some at competing companies as well; these employees now have better information and information that is closer to parity with the actor they are negotiating with).

The purpose of idealized models is not to a deliberately unanswerable demand "If it isn't a 'Free Market' the market isn't free!"; but to act as a simplified analytical tool that allows you to focus more clearly on the aspects of the real market that are most or least like their ideal counterparts and tease out how the non-ideal behavior changes the outcomes.

You do realize that 'perfect information' is one of the defining characteristics of the idealized model of 'free market' behavior? You don't have to like it; but calling anything vaguely related to money that displeases you 'socialistic' is dumb beyond words.

Wasn't Google going to index all the world's information, at one point? It appears that they might be making an exception.

We, the fine folks at the interactive advertising bureau, are delighted by the notion of a 'consumer preference client'. Indeed, we are so strongly committed to it that we recommend that it be incorporated at the hardware level, in order to provide additional trust in the 'Trusted Platform' that forms the foundation of the secure online marketplaces of tomorrow. With a suitably immutable GUID baked into every piece of hardware, we can finally ensure that each and every consumer receives exactly the privacy settings and offers most relevant to them!

Given the enthusiasm for what is more or less exactly the same plan applied to teachers, it's hard to be too surprised that somebody would think that this is a good idea; though it doesn't shed any light on why they would have ignored the obvious pitfalls.

I can only assume that it's yet another instance of the "We want to measure stuff; but what we really want to measure is hard, so we'll settle for something that is easy to measure but not actually helpful" problem that bedevils quantification efforts of all kinds.

I think that he was hoping for a good, old-school, insertion of knife into abdomen and pulling all the way across to demonstrate contrition through horribly painful death; in the fine Japanese tradition.

I would actually be interested to know what the logic is here: the hacker clearly doesn't like AM, or they wouldn't be spoiling their rumored-IPO quite this enthusiastically, they also don't like the users they are threatening to expose; but they also appear to be really bent out of shape about AM's allegedly-dishonest-and-exploitative 'pay to purge the embarrassing traces' feature.

Anger about that feature would seem to be something more likely in some portion of the users, or among people who identify with the interests of the users; but this interested party displays only contempt for them; rather than viewing AM's attempt to squeeze them as an amusing and justified punishment.

We obviously have no particular reason to trust their statement; but we do have to expect that they have a reason worth the legal exposure for doing this(especially since the dataset they are talking about would probably be worth a decent sum for sale to others looking for really juicy spearphishing targets ) rather than not attempting the hack at all or hacking but then staying quiet about it. My guess would be that it is more about attacking the site operator than about the users specifically; it is pretty common for at least a person or two to end up suitably embittered during the course of business.