I never said getting "complicated designs" from brainstorming sessions is easy. I used neither of these words, nor any implication which indirectly means this. What makes you invoke this straw man?

You talked about "working together", so my post was directed at one of the types of working together.

Working with people in different continents means brainstorming with them too. That means 10 people will have different pieces of information, 10 will have ideas based on them. A single person can "plan" ahead only as much as his own information. This being 10% of the total information, ideas generated by himself would need to be seriously modified even if useful by themselves. This modification needs to be communicated fast and effectively - even while being bombarded by 9 others giving extra information and giving their own original and modified ideas.

The above might seem more chaotic than it needs to be, but it is definitely something for which "planning" gets dwarfed.

With 10 people in the same room, an effective brainstorming session can be produced. Something about the virtual central shared whiteboard hampers it.

Is there any way you like to highlight things? Do you see code better when different fonts / styles are used for different types of texts in the code? Underline / bold etc.?

About bad "ls" colour schemes, I have myself used "echo *" as a more readable alternative to "ls". Of course, you could change "ls" colour scheme or "ls --color=never"

These problems have been very nearly solved in vim and emacs environments for most popular programming languages. For C - for at least 15 years, for java - at least 5 years.

All these events, if occasional, can be mitigated by saving / investment. If regular, most businesses will shut down.

Are you saying this is about raising the wages for some month only when certain astrological patterns are seen, on an average one month a year?

Imitate, assimilate, innovate - Clark Terry

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing - Salvador Dali

Yes, I forgot to mention that though theoretical rarity is similar as you say, practically orders of magnitude more mined gold exists than platinum. So they cannot be said to be similar from a practical perspective.

Given the physical dissimilarities, calling them similar is very wrong.

So to measure the worth of Coca Cola, you need to spend lots of money in establishing another cola company and make it sell no name brand cola. This is not practical. If the company is imaginary, it doesn't come under "easily established", it comes under "educated guess" that the GP was mentioning.

If the value of this imaginary company is assumed to be zero, you are essentially saying the value of Coca Cola company is same as the value of the Coca Cola brand. This is clearly wrong.

They are extremely dissimalar.

1. Platinum is harder than pure iron - though matches gold in ductility and malleability if enough force is applied. It is much much harder to work with than gold.

If you have raw gold as money, you can divide it into pieces with relatively little skill or force. Not so with platinum.

2. Platinum is much much rarer than gold.

Diamonds break easily along some lines. Once they break along those lines, the value of large diamonds is greatly reduced.

1. Somewhat less easily verified than gold.

2. Not divisible - the worth is proportional to fourth power of size, depending on other factors. And serious technology is required to divide it, except along the lines at which a piece of diamond wants to be divided.

So you have a diamond worth 20 horses, but you want only one horse. By dividing the diamond into 20, you have reduced the worth of your diamond by many orders of magnitude. IF you are able to divide it into 20 at all.

Wrong. At least according to a popular theory which you are too stupid to understand.

1. People claiming to want to study opposing viewpoints are a dime a dozen.

2. Atypical people don't matter anyway.

3. The revenue generated from ads, normalized by adblocking people, is so little that most people would be limited by time to view all the material rather than the money to pay for it. Except for badly scaling pricing models - but when bad models are assumed, any number of things can wrong, viewpoint bubbles are the least of worries.

Come on! These are movie people. They might call Bruce Willis to deal with a hostage situation.

1. Human psyche isn't amenable to looking at things disagreeing with them. Any system evolved / used by humans will have that problem. Even without internet.org / zero / facebook / lots of paid websites - most people live in their own bubble.

2. Even without internet.org/zero - facebook already puts you into your own bubble. Things similar to those you like are shown more. There is no dislike button for similar deliberate purposes. Facebook blames this on users, but they know that showing you things that you like is a good way to keep you coming back for more.

3. In effect you are saying paid websites would "put viewers in a bubble where they're unwilling to look at a site with opposing viewpoints", whereas without the paid websites they are already in the same bubble. I don't see a difference.