>"Over 90% of startups die"

One of those widely repeated number, but not true: number is below 60%.

https://www.google.com/amp/amp.timeinc.net/fortune/2017/06/2...

> Cambridge Associates, a global investment firm based in Boston, tracked the performance of venture investments in 27,259 startups between 1990 and 2010. Its research reveals that the real percentage of venture-backed startups that fail—as defined by companies that provide a 1X return or less to investors—has not risen above 60% since 2001. Even amid the dotcom bust of 2000, the failure rate topped out at 79%.

I am wildly skeptical of these numbers, and could not find the actual study after a quick search on Google. It seems to ignore seed investments for starters, and many "exits" (acquihires) aren't public information, so how they quantify this is ambiguous.

If we consider a startup to begin when someone decides to quit their job and work on it full-time and a successful exit as a positive ROI to most investors in less than 10 years, I'd estimate the number as closer to 99% (most people never get any funding for their startups at all). Of course, I have no hard numbers to back that up.

It would be hard to really quantify. You have everything from worked nights and weekends for a year and nothing ever came of it to acquihires with a nice but modest payout to breakeven acquisitions to IPOs or other big exits. I'm sure if you include friends & family money (or personal money) and sweat equity the failure rate goes way up.

Except if you're in a family with a sick parent and you wonder whether you should encourage more exercise or not. Much more important than bar room banter.

Making decisions based on bad science probably isn't a good idea. Ever.

I agree with that easy statement. But you have to make decisions, even when there is no science at all.

What is your estimate of the right control group size should be, for such a study?

I am learning from that study that, on 494 patients, they found no clear cut link between exercise and dementia evolution. Are you saying there is a clear cut one?

Maybe there is a link, but if it was very significant, hopefully the study would have detected a correlation.

My bottom-line for my life: don't focus on pushing physical exercise if your loved one has dementia, there is no clear cut link detected today. It is interesting as for some, their "intuition" may make them believe there is one.

Please correct which part of my reasoning is wrong here. I am talking about real life, not a conversation at a bar.

You should always encourage exercise. It has a number of advantages.

I recommend the American Life episode about Alex Zharov, stranded on a desert island in New York City.

It really gives a vivid insight on how some people find themselves lucky when others do not.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/307/in-the-shadow-of-the-ci...

Thought experiment: it may be interesting for a corporation to insert a fairly crazy NCA rule just to see how the applicant reacts.

Every now and then there are some crazy stuff happening in big organizations, and you probably want someone who is able to call those out, politely but firmly, rather than pushing them under the rug.

I don't think the lawyers would allow that kind of trickery.

"Westminster is at least the fourth college site bought by Chinese interests since 2015."

Pretty much one per year. Let's keep looking at it, but probably nowhere as near as foreign companies investing in China's education system.

it may be a bit unfair to judge them by looking at today's website, which is not in service anymore, even if they have a home page.

"Today, Foundem’s website is the digital equivalent of a boarded-up house"

Their business is dead, because they were artificially demoted to 4th page in search when Google Product Search was created.

Yes but its a poor quality comparison site that added no value I know sites also hit by penguin that where far more worthy.

Kellys Directory for example which had its roots in a company founded in the 1700's

It was always just a basic price comparison site though.

in the article maybe?

"By now the couple had been joined by numerous other complainants, including Expedia, TripAdvisor and Microsoft"

Busted.

It's also even in the second paragraph: 'being the first plaintiff, the others being Yelp, etc...'

The article's title is extreme clickbait. This couple didn't "take on" Google, or even this case. A European commission took on the case, representing the interests of many corporations.

Tim Ferris got to 4 hours per week by working 70+h per week for a long time, then firing his least profitable clients, automating/delegating and giving up about growing his business further.

you'll never get there working 4 hours a week. And you'll never do 4 hours a week if you are passionate about your job, or a rat racer.

src: his book the 4 hours work week

Guilty too, but the writing was the main point to me:

"I’m not saying your seat is small, but if it were a haystack, you’d find the needle"

>Since 2014, eight other babies have been born to women who had uterus transplants, all in Sweden

Just to show that single payer system can be good for medical innovation, not just universal healthcare.

It looks like the swedish transplants were funded by research at a university, not insurance: http://sahlgrenska.gu.se/english/research/uterus/questions (though perhaps that's a distinction without a difference?)

> The cost of a uterus transplantation is estimated to be around SEK 100,000 per patient. [...] > Will this cost the patient anything? > No. The first initial experiments with uterus transplantation will be covered entirely by research funding.

Apparently some of the research also came from a Professor in the US:

> The team learned this technique at the University of Connecticut and received help at the beginning from Professor John McCracken, who is a pioneer in reproductive medical research. It took about a year before the autotransplantation method on sheep worked well.

Single-payer systems also have to constrain costs, so its not clear that they would actually cover a procedure like this, or if they did there might be a really limited supply. (I suppose the supply would be inherently limited anyway by how many available uteri there are)

Single-payer systems are actually rarely actually single-payer. For example apparently private insurance is becoming more popular in Sweden:

> The number of people purchasing supplementary private insurance is rapidly increasing, from 2.3 per cent of the population in 2004 (Swedish Insurance Federation 2004) to approximately 4.6 per cent in 2008 (Trygg-Hansa 2008). The voluntary health insurance mainly gives quick access to a specialist and allows for jumping the waiting queue for elective surgery (Glenngård et al. 2005).

http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/98417/E9...

> Single-payer systems also have to constrain costs, so its not clear that they would actually cover a procedure like this,

I wouldn't think they would, but the existence of a single-payer system didn't prevent research on this.

> Single-payer systems are actually rarely actually single-payer.

What you mean in this case is purely single-payer. Paying for things that are outside of normal health care, like fancy private rooms or plastic surgery don't seem like they would have a negative effect. Getting quick access to a specialist seems problematic, though, but maybe the quick access to a specialist means ability to quickly consult with a foreign specialist; there's not a lot of detail there.