It would correlate, except so many things have gotten dramatically cheaper while the cost of, say, bread has stayed the same (adjusted for inflation). It's possible for inflation-adjusted income to stagnate while standard of living increases, and I'd argue that it has. As petty as it sounds, I'm pretty glad I live in a world with Google.
Depends how you define standard of living. If we consider "standard of living" to mean "happiness", as you seem to imply, that actually correlates well with real (inflation/CPI-adjusted) income. Accordingly, happiness levels have been flat and/or declining for the vast majority of the population [1], just as real wages have.
This may be a gap in my understanding of objective measures of standard of living. I agree I'd rather have Google. I'll have to do some research.
It may be a moot point, since no one can objectively compare their standard of living to that of an equivalent person 40 years ago (or even themselves 40 years ago.)
This is why I like HN so much---the entire culture is aimed at getting rich by startup, which is a mercilessly meritocratic process. It's extremely focused on whatcanyoudo?
An hour spent hacking to make something useful or cool is never a wasted hour. But wouldn't it suck to realize that you spent years in grad school without even learning anything?
In any case, this sort of news---the rise of cheating---is both good news and bad news for founders. The good is that your competitors are probably hiring these people. Especially so for folks like AirBnB who are competing with hotel chains, etc.
The bad, of course, is that when hiring, you might run into people like this. But if your hiring process>your competitor's process, then this is very much a net gain for you.
...the entire culture is aimed at getting rich by startup, which is a mercilessly meritocratic process.
I think the entire culture is aimed at a much broader motivation than that. It is aimed at a culture of intense intellectual curiosity, which makes the community self-selecting in meritocratic way.
This carries into startups as well, because they are as much about what you can learn as what you can do. Presumably, most startups are exploring at least some uncharted territory. How curious you are about that territory will suggest how much you can learn from it, and what you can learn from it will certainly have an effect on how well you execute.
As a result, startups end up as one of the primary focusses of the culture, but I think this as much a byproduct as it is an end to itself.
Ah, but it doesn't apply to the business world, that's the thing. What makes school bullying viable is that nothing you do matters---the effect of everything you do is delayed twelve years. Everyone progresses at the same rate through the institution, in spite of high or low performance. So if no one's going to outrace you (and even if they did, it would only be academically, which no one cares about it in k-12), there's no real penalty for becoming some poor kid's private nightmare.
Not so much in the business world (and especially tech); while you're busy engaging in a dogfight with Joe Competitor, some third company is kicking your trash by spending money on R&D rather than winning a marketing/feature war. So it generally makes sense to avoid direct confrontation, because it slows you down.
I don't know besides my company, but as a generalist technical founder, I would be loathe to take someone with experience in x technology over a generalist who'd shown ability to learn new technologies. We work with Flash, clojure, and assembly, which is obviously the weirdest smorgasbord ever. I have yet to see a resume that mentions anything but flash, so I've tried to look for people who look smart and a little arrogant instead, while still being personable.
Fun fact---I discovered "Open Source Cook" on facebook while I searched for Cooks Source. I was thinking today that there MUST be an open-source set of recipes or something similar out there.
I meant for the customer, and while I agree that grocery stores don't care about deadweight loss for their customers, I think they could.
I think the chief reason line length is considered noise rather than signal is because it's so unpredictable. When it's known, people do a great deal to minimize their time spent in line. They go to the store at off hours; they switch lines once they're standing in them. I know my local Taco Bell gets a lot more business from me because of their speedy response time, vs. the teriyaki place next door that I like more, but takes forever. And my college's bookstore has had a great deal of success with putting live camera feeds of their lines (or lack thereof) on their website.
But with grocery stores, I couldn't really tell you which of the two grocery stores in my area would have a longer line. They're about the same, and that's close enough.
So you'd need a pretty big delta for line length to become a differentiating factor between stores. The current system of a cashier scanning items individually probably won't see drastic efficiency improvements without drastic changes, so...drastic changes are needed.
After a certain point, changes in "line length" become "presence or absence of a line at all." As jonnathanson says below, electronic scan-as-you-buy is probably the future there(Smith's, in answer to my cousin's email inquiry, mentioned they were testing a portable bar code scanner). I'm under the impression that grocery stores have pretty cruddy margins, so maybe I shouldn't read that much into "in testing." If anyone out there is dying for a startup idea, I think this one is worth a look. (Before you say it, I'm working on another project, and my cousin left for grad school.)
Since few things are more self-satisfying than sailing out of a store without waiting in line, maybe Whole Foods will be the first? ;)
"On a day-to-day basis, it is suggested this could mean that social contact leads to 'over-stimulation,' explaining why introverts would withdraw or shy away."
Anyone else feel like this? I come alive in small groups and one-on-one, but at some threshold (10+ people or so), I feel like there's just too much complexity flying around. Note that I'm pretty sure it's the complexity thing---a group of 300 people all listening to a lecture is easy to deal with, but 40 mixed singles all trying to meet/impress each other seems as complicated as this (http://xkcd.com/173/) would be with 40 people.
Introverts tend to be much more polite in terms of giving people space in comparison to extraverts. They wait their turn to speak and don't interrupt others. Extraverts have a tendency to just jump in and listen to whoever is the loudest. Us introverts tend to get confused by this because we're looking for clear delineation between one speaker and the next that simply doesn't exist.
Well, I've learned to be impatient and not wait my turn, when a discussion requires it. That kind of social interaction tires me out though. I like calm. Excitement only prevents rational thinking.
Definitely. My wife and I both find socializing with large groups of people to be exhausting. The amount of social cues, body language, personal spaces, etc. to follow scales exponentially with the number of people, unless/until they split into smaller groups.
