This reminds me of the scene in Silicon Valley where Peter Gregory notices the popularity of Burger King, the number of sesame seeds they use, and remembers that sesame seeds only grow in Myanmar, Brazil, and Indonesia - the former two of which have large Cicada populations that emerge at different times. After some research, he finds that this is about to occur simultaneously in both countries for the first time in a couple of centuries. Apparently Indonesia doesn't have cicadas, so he purchases some surprisingly cheap Indonesian sesame seed futures based on the expectation that the price will spike next year.
Whoever did the detective work in the top answer to this article should get into investing, if they aren't already.
That reminds me of a scene from Liar's Poker, I wonder if it was the inspiration:
Remember Chernobyl? When news broke that the Soviet nuclear reactor had exploded, Alexander called. Only minutes before, yet Alexander had already bought the equivalent of two supertankers of crude oil. The focus of investor attention was on the New York Stock Exchange, he said. In particular it was on any company involved in nuclear power. The stocks of those companies were plummeting. Never mind that, he said. He had just purchased, on behalf on his clients, oil futures. Instantly in his mind less supply of nuclear power equaled more demand for oil, and he was right. His investors made a large killing.
Minutes later, Alexander called back. “Buy potatoes,” he said. “Gotta hop.” Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncontaminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russia, but I have never met them.
> Whoever did the detective work in the top answer to this article should get into investing, if they aren't already.
I know some person who does this kind of detective work, let's express it this way: as a private, really time-intense hobby. Among others he revealed a complicated case of insolvency fraud and investment fraud involving multiple countries and stooges.
The sole reason he started all this detective work was because some customer was not willing to pay him as agreed for a web design job that he did (surely not more than 2000 €) - you cannot make up such a reason and story.
While he has a lot of talent for this kind of detective work, I would never give or lend him any money for the single reason that he simply has not the slightest magic touch for making money.
i certainly have to agree entirely with what you said. i just recently got into watching silicon valley and have been binge watching it, and you definitely have a point with how the analysis in the top answer is very reminiscent of the mentality that Peter Gregory would so frequently display.
Sesame seed production – 2014
Country Production (tonnes)
Tanzania 1,138,920
India 811,000
Sudan 721,000
China 629,900
Myanmar 519,400
Nigeria 434,990
World 6,235,530
Oh sorry, thanks for the correction, I really did confidently believe it was the final scene in the pilot for some reason. Wish I could delete my comment.
It's a sign of a "cognitive surplus", because we have more educated people now than we have jobs for them to do. Also it's a sign of how these sites get people to work for them for free, and concentrate huge amounts of other people's work for their own benefit. This poster got nothing for all that work, but SE still gets advertising revenue driven by interest in the content.
Oh please. It's just someone enjoying a challenge and hunting down something for gratification. Let's not make it out to be more than it is. There have always been people that go above and beyond for intellectual gratification and out of nothing more than curiosity.
There have always been people willing to do things like this for "no good reason" and for nothing in return since time immemorial. I don't want to live in a world devoid of such awesomeness. I've done it myself and hope to continue to do so, even being cognizant as I am that someone may benefit from my toils without my making a buck. If I spend a month developing an open source library that does something novel and release it under a liberal license (MIT, BSD) on GitHub, am I not doing the same sort of thing every day?
This SE answer is awesome and it's helpful and insightful; but it isn't an example of capitalism at work and poor people being fleeced out of their time and money so the big guy can make a buck.
Respect to the poster. That was some legit research.
I agree. The stack exchange is a place I whitelist in my adblocker. They seem to take ads and ad quality seriously, they provided very useful and interesting content, and they employ a pretty excellent team. I don't see the problem. It seems like what you'd hope for from the situation.
Not all utility is money. The poster voluntarily spent time and energy creating that response, and voluntary exchange is mutually beneficial. So the poster got something for all that work, but it wasn't money.
What's your basis for this claim? I can see saying "this poster received no financial compensation for all this work" but that's a different claim. It seems to me that the poster must have received somethingp[1], or they would not have put the effort forth in the first place.
[1]: where "something" could be self-satisfaction, ego-boost, intellectual gratification, or any number of other non-financial rewards.
I think your line of thinking only implies the poster believed that he would receive a rewards, not that he did receive a reward (he may have regretted doing the work afterwards).
Night clubs actually pay their DJs, bartenders, bouncers, etc. And they might comp more attractive patrons, which isn't quite the same as paying them but it's not nothing.
another example that there is not enough work to go around is that if you go into any downtown anywhere in the world at 7 pm to 8 p.m. you will see people drinking beer in bars.
These same people could still be working, since there is no reason they shouldn't be in an office, factory, etc, for a full 14-hour workday. Clearly there is just not enough work to go around, which manifests itself as people sitting around drinking or going on fun Internet sleuthing that nobody would mistake for work.
People write all sorts of nonsense for newspapers and get paid for it. Just because you personally don't value some labour doesn't mean it's not valuable labour.
I'm not arguing from first principles here. Workforce participation is down. This is just a symptom. I'm not against having free time, but against companies who ask you to work for them for free. If people had the ability to make money with their time and effort, that guy would be more likely to be paid for his post.
SE provides a venue for these types of discussions, and in exchange does a small amount of advertising to make the venture profitable. How is that exploitative in any sense of the word? Do you have the same attitude towards social clubs that charge fees?
I don't go to SE for the "venue". I usually get there via a Google search, which means the only draw is the content. And hopefully Google would give me the same info if it were on any other site that paid their writers.
you don't go for the venue, but others do - the asker and the answerer who generated the content in the first place. You're just getting the benefit of their exchange due to SE's existence. I don't understand why you have an issue with SE hosting content in exchange for permission to advertise on it. I have to pay amazon/digitalocean to host my content - if it costs something for a host to provide it then they can either make the money back somehow or constantly lose money.
But the only thing SE has to offer is other people's content. And I don't have a problem with them making money, but with not sharing any with the people who are the reason the site gets money. They're not even middlemen who take a cut, they're getting 100% of the revenue.
but that implies that content is the only valuable thing, and distribution and hosting are negligible. If anything, it's the other way around - content is abundant and quality distribution is the hard problem. That's the reason the marketing industry is one of the largest around.
If people want to try to make money from their Q&As they can post them on their own site and either charge for access or advertise, but then they'll need to market it to get revenue so then they become like an SE but only for their own content and they'll make very little money anyway. That's basically the position of a professional blogger and very few of those make any real money.
yeah - people who provide services become successful. It's a pretty good system as long as we can keep the less successful people out of poverty. Equality of outcome is possibly the worst idea in history.
of course - equality under the law. People like to act like equality of outcome is a natural extension from legal equality but it simply isn't.
I know we don't keep people out of poverty right now, and that's something that needs to be fixed. But if you think equality of outcome (i.e. eliminating economic disparity) is the solution to that then you may want to read up on the USSR and Maoist China. Capitalism is pretty good at raising the living standard of the whole population, even if it does end up creating billionaires at the same time.
I'm in favor of democracy. I think the government should represent each person's interests equally no matter how rich they are. I think the only reason we didn't have a violent worker's revolution in America is that we were able to pass the socialist platform democratically.
welfare existed long before socialism and is pretty distinct. Systems of welfare were passed democratically, as they should be. The main reason the West in general didn't have any worker's revolutions (excluding Spain) is that the capitalism+welfare situation we have actually works really well.
No, I'm saying people are less likely to work for free when they can find work that pays instead. Seeing lots of people do work for free is a symptom that lots of people are underemployed.
The smaller stack exchanges are a really wonderful source of content I never thought I needed to know. I always check out the "hot network questions" side panel when I land on stack overflow and almost always find something interesting.
I always get sucked in to the addicting Hot Network Questions as well when I land on Stack Overflow, which is why I need to block the entire sidebar so that I can get some work done!
I also block the Hot Network Questions on Stack Exchange sites while at work – though not when using my home profile. As a Firefox user, I simply added the following lines to my `userContent.css`:
It's a shame that the internet devolved into cat pictures, pervasive advertisements, and political shouting matches. On the other hand, there are still some great communities out there for great discussion. I consider HN to be one of them.
Not really, "dilution" implies that when the Internet grows to include another crappy site everything else in the "solution" is slightly crappier. If a new web site for cat pictures or political shouting matches opens up tomorrow, it does not affect the quality and usefulness of HN.
I genuinely worry about the day the SA forums get shut down for whatever reason. I've been posting there since 2003 and it's my first stop on the 'daily internet check' ritual.
Exactly. I started skimming the article like I do most these days, scrolling to the punch line while collecting the gist. When I got to the part about the ball being a knock-off, I was struck with excitement because I knew I wanted to read this whole thing, word for word.
A Point. We seem to make a lot of cost-benefit analyses for every decision make instead of just doing something because it's good to do. We living in the age of matured internet seemed to be only interested in contents that could help us make a point (Read: ROI) during a discussion or debate unlike people earlier just wanted to know something with no reason. Hence triviality didn't come as a filter.
More seriously, I sometimes sorta miss USENET. However, my ISP actually still provisions it. It has been a while, but I have gone back to check it out. It's nothing like I remember, so I don't end up making it a point to check the groups regularly and I leave it alone for a few more years.
you should read some of /pol/'s analysis of the email leaks from last year: it was truly a wonder of crowd-sourced investigation. They even set up meta investigators (managers?) to help guide the anonymous users' investigations to make sure that all of the emails got read and categorized.
It was. Very professional, considering it was all anonymous. But there were high standards and major findings had to be verified before being disseminated.
A long time ago I worked as a "designer" for somebody who owned a chain of medium retail stores in Mexico and a also biggish printshop. When there was a (printed) product was selling very well, he would go to me and ask me to make one as similar as possible so he can manufacture it and get more of the profits.
He did it all the time and didn't care at all for the quality of the product. At first I tried to make the illustrations myself or actually try to do an original spin on the product, but he put pressure to just pull a clip art and call it a day.
Some times I tried to hide some in-jokes or innappropiate stuff just to see if anybody noticed. For example, he once got me to to copy a whole book on some catholic saint, on a hurry, and refuse to pay some one to proff-read it. So I intentionally replaced some words here and there to change the meaning and I even changed the name of the saint to "Batman" in the middle of the book. Nobody ever noticed.
So my guess is that whoever designed this ball is on a similar situation and did put even less effort into doing it, than whoever has the third top answer in the Stackoverflow post. Or maybe she even put a swedish axe just to see if anybody would notice.
The top answer is a picture of the use of Yxa in a Swedish alphabet learning book, yet there's still people here clinging to the yellow paint tube theory.
Incredible. Not sure what cognitive bias is at play here (or more charitably: perhaps they didn't scroll down).
That top answer is hardly conclusive - it's definitely a possibility, but given the weird choices in the art for the "axe" (bendy handle, not a defined edge at the bottom) - I buy it could have been a yellow paint tube.
Nouns beginning with Y are not exactly easy to come across (the official "Yo-Yo" is hardly as common as the other words on the ball), and as has been pointed out, it's entirely possible the art was worked on by multiple people and changed or whatever.
Maybe the wrong-language thing is more likely (the U-boat choice is the thing that makes me lean this way the most), but I don't think the yellow paint tube idea is completely impossible.
I don't know how anyone would come to that conclusion. It's "definitely not possibly" (adverb chaining, really?) a tube squirting yellow in image. If ascribing modern symbolism to images rather than what's portrayed plainly, there's no reason that any of the images are symbolic of words starting with the appropriate letters.
There's no proof yet, so your judgement is speculative and presumptuous, even if the right answer turns out to be Yxa. The top answer is awesome, and probably right, but who knows for sure? Do you? It's top because of popularity and not because he solved it. Since all answers including the top answer suppose this was a mistake, it's easy to imagine it being the result of a stupid mistake as opposed to one that feels rational. If this turned out to be a stupid mistake and that yellow or something other than Yxa is the right answer, will you reflect on where the cognitive bias lies?
Presumptuous, huh? There is no absolute proof of anything, but the Swedish axe image is substantial proof to me.
I suppose that when the designer comes forward and explains the way the image was chosen, there will be people who argue the designer is lying, or misremembering, or trying to hide the fact that their drawing was interpreted the wrong way.
This way UFOs, 9-11 Truthers, and homeopathy lies.
Yes, declaring that anyone who doesn't believe that Yxa is the answer is suffering from cognitive bias is definitely presumptuous. That statement is absolutely making assumptions, and using that to cast unwarranted negative aspersions on anyone who disagrees with you.
And you just did it again by referring to UFOs and homeopathy. This is not a case of conspiracy, this is a case of people looking for possibilities. By making analogies to truthers, and painting a conspiracy theory in advance, you are undermining Dan Bron's work and demonstrating your own cognitive bias.
You're choosing which proof to believe. The image of the (presumed) axe on the ball is yellow, that's also "substantial proof". It is, in fact, yellow. It's not unreasonable to suggest that there's better direct evidence, and a simpler explanation, for the "yellow" answer than there is for the "Yxa" answer.
Maybe the designer was Asian and accidentally saw the Y as an upside-down A, maybe "axe" was the word they were going for. Maybe the designer was Asian and used yuè, the pinyin word for axe. (https://english.stackexchange.com/a/395521)
It's not likely that a definitive answer will be found, so let's enjoy reading and speculating about it, bask in the awesomeness of Dan Bron's narrative and presentation, and lay off the unjustifiable holier-than-thou attitude that there's only one possible answer.
Assuming this was made in China, there are two sources of confusion that could lead to this mix up.
1. The letter 'A' and an upside down Y-shaped character share the same key on a Chinese/English key board. This could lead to an unintended subconscious relationship between these symbol shapes.[1]
2. The orientation of these characters abruptly changed on the ball graphic between W and Q, leaving the orientation of the Y-shaped letter unclear to someone with minimal familiarity of Latin letters. An upside down Y is also easy to confuse with the letter A if you are not familiar.
This all assumes that Axe was the first common-'A' word selected. Perhaps they postponed the choice of the common-'Y' word given it is challenging. After misattributing Y for A, then someone just added an Apple graphic.
I thought as the shop owner. Where would I buy things for cheap. Alibaba was my first thought. Went there and searched for the ball... bingo!
Now I am hot on the trail of unraveling the entire mystery...
What I am now doing is to think like the person who designed it. The more I can be in their shoes the better. This has led me to find the discrepancies from the original ball and this one (the knockoff). I have focused on what is different between the two.
So far it is Y. V. and U which has led me to look for clip art that is similar between them.
I am not of the belief that it is an axe (yxa)until it is proven.
My first search was the other products from the company to see if it was used other places/products to no avail.
Now I am finding the clip art in alphabet sets and flashcards.
The more that are similar will lead to the answer(s).
Now looking for clipart that has V is for volcano. Found a few and now looking for axes etc but...
My current theory is that it is NOT an ax or yxa but paint for Yellow like the second post shows.
My photoshop skills are not great but I think it is a combination from this image http://clipground.com/image-post/90353-red-color-tube-clipar... or this image http://clipground.com/image-post/90353-red-color-tube-clipar... (I also think that it does not have to be originally yellow as that is a simple change to do in photoshop so the other colors can work) The caps in this picture are very close as are the paint threads and my guess is that they can be overlaid with near perfection if my photoshop skills allowed.
I was led to this site because of the image for U-boat is here on the same site
http://clipground.com/image-post/62547-submarine-boat-clipar...
I now see the ball I found and believe that the ax/yxa is an axe in the ball but has been changed in the OP ball to another variation. Off to find that variation via the other changes like volcano etc.
This was such a delightful read. A quote from the wonderful Okja recently released on Netflix: "Never mistranslate!"... unless you make balls for toddlers!
Agreed. I actually considered pointing out that in my original comment.
As an American with a fascination in documentaries I have heard the term a lot but most consider it to be very specific to military submarines operated by Germany in the first and second world wars only. I suppose the term Unterseeboot still sees usage outside of the States these days.
FWIW, in America, modern submarines are exclusively called "boats" by people who work on and around them (regardless of size). Definitely not "u-boats." Never heard anyone outside the submarine community say "boat" though and I've had people in the general public try to "correct" me when I said "boat" to refer to a submarine.
Perhaps the concept artist drew poorly a tube of acrylic paint squeezing some yellow goop and the person responsible for the final product couldn't figure out what the heck they were looking at, but said "Well it looks like an axe to me" (in some language other than English) and changed it accordingly.
I've always found English SE to be interesting, because it varies between questions like this with extremely well thought up answers and questions that are so-so.
Possible, but there's ample evidence around the Yxa (Swedish name for axe) theory. Even use in a similar context: https://i.stack.imgur.com/LNTu2.jpghttps://i.stack.imgur.com/xzaQ9.jpg And it matches the "U" for "U-Boat", which apparently would be more common in Swedish (Ubåt) to refer to a submarine. It does require you believe whoever made the ball mixed Swedish and English, which seems possible given that it is a Chinese knockoff of a Hedstrom product.
Whoever did the detective work in the top answer to this article should get into investing, if they aren't already.