Franholio

I did Kids Jeopardy back in '02 and they paid for a roundtrip flight to LA for me and my family, 4 nights in the Beverly Hilton, and $600 in spending money for the trip. Guess the adults get a raw deal.

There's certainly some truth to this. Lisa, the one woman Neil actually dated and cared about in The Game, was turned off by his PUA tricks.

Read The Game and loved it. Two questions:

1. Why didn't you bang Courtney Love?

2. How would you use game in a small college setting, where everyone knows everyone else?

I also work with big data/SQL on a daily basis. There are quite a few roadblocks to the scenario you describe:

1. Fragmentation of data. It's very rare for all the relevant data to sit in a single table. We have thousands of different tables, each with a tiny fragment of the data the business uses on a daily basis. It's tough to join more than ~10 tables before performance, syntax/human error, and data quality get in the way.

2. Data quality. Even if you run the correct script, there are all kinds of errors that occur. Null values, duplicated rows, changes in column names, etc. Metadata and documentation are rarely a primary concern of organizations, which makes it hard to track potential issues that can occur.

3. Talent/human error. It takes highly skilled analysts to write efficient queries that can do complex things, and highly skilled data stewards to build and maintain the databases. Guess where they generally want to work? Big banks, hedge funds, and tech companies, who can afford to pay them more while working in a healthier culture. Snowden hasn't made the NSA's recruiting challenges any easier.

Honestly, the more data the NSA gathers, the less efficient they'll be at fitting the data together to form comprehensive pictures of people. Quality > quantity.