barretts

I prefer to interpret this in the most generous possible light.

Is it early-stage tech initially targeted at data-obsessed rich techies with unproven health benefits? Sure.

Is it also smart people trying to do something novel and hard by making an expensive and inconvenient diagnostic tool much more accessible, with the possibility of preventing (or diagnosing earlier) some terrible and deadly medical conditions? Yes.

I don't know why you wouldn't want to adopt lens number two.

NYC has a "right to housing" law that requires the government to provide a roof for anyone who needs it, including migrants. With the recent influx of migrants this is causing unforeseen spending that will total $5bn in 2023.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/nyregion/adams-nyc-migran...

For a guy who's always railing about the value of honest, rational discourse, he's unbelievably misleading and political in this post. He ignores asset growth and the fact that all the wealth tax proposals have a very high floor for the tax.

Saying the government will take 45% of your wealth above $100M is very different than saying the government will take 45% of your wealth.

We talk about the lessons of 1968. What does that period of unrest really teach us? It led to the election of Nixon.

You're focused on the trees, not the forest. The prior commenter is right: Unless you are very poor (and get Medicaid) or old (and get Medicare), most Americans receive no government assistance for healthcare.

I'm sorry for your indentured servitude.

And evading paywalls disproportionately impacts the journalists creating the stories you seem to value, though for some reason refuse to pay for.

Do you think the 1,600 journalists at The New York Times, many of whom work in difficult environments (including the White House, lol), should work for free? Quite the Scrooge move.

It's not just amount of snow but terrain. A fair bit of snow on a flat surface might be fine, but even a little bit on a slope can quickly become problematic if you don't have 4x4.

Wow. If accurate, you've done a better job explaining the situation in 250 words than the entire NYT article did.

Finding, downloading, and using those apps is a whole exercise in pain tolerance. Took me an hour-plus to download the timelapse app.

I am also a Sony Alpha user and the interface seems anti-designed. Like, willfully obtuse and user-hostile. I know UI is not easy, but relative to the scope/scale of Sony, how hard would it really be for them to cop even a few best practices in software design?

One important factor unmentioned so far: Federalism. The US has very strong state and municipal governments compared to France and Japan. In many cases, any one of the three can veto a project. A new commuter rail line under the Hudson River connecting NYC and NJ was begun in 2009 and NJ Gov Chris Christie killed it in 2010 (citing cost overruns), after $600m had already been spent.

Don't be obtuse. College students painting banners is a far cry from a presidential candidate refusing to concede an election over imagined vote fraud. And there is a strong chance that's what Trump would have done.

Yes, Obama also opened up a jobs portal on his transition site.

Forbes' "Please turn off your adblocker" interstitial is a great reminder not to read Forbes' clickbait bullshit pseudo-journalism.

Is this the same trend data Google is showing in location search engine results?

Very similar idea, but different source (4SQ app versus Android/Google apps). Also I'd imagine the 4SQ enterprise offering has a lot more ways to slice and dice the data so that it's useful for business.

They're selling location trend data to anyone who will buy it. Retail operators (like Apple) may buy it, but the more typical customers for these types of services are hedge funds and other traders who want an edge. They'll correlate check-in volume with iPhone sales, for instance, to more accurately estimate Apple's quarterly revenues before they're announced.

I think the scary thing is that it doesn't depend on people using the app - merely having it installed. Pilgrim passively tracks your location whether or not you check in (or even open the app).

Not at all true. Employee option prices are not based on market (e.g. VC) valuation. They're based on 409A valuations which are usually much, much lower.

Any reason I shouldn't see this as a complicated tax dodge? Simply more multinational pilfering from public coffers? Why shouldn't the Alibaba capital gains be taxed?

There is art that revels in loudness, and art that embraces subtlety. They can coexist. A Palahniuk novel does not negate an Ishiguro. The world is too big and audiences too fragmented for any one thing to dominate.

if they could get a company like Factset or Bloomberg to let them do direct data pulls from their databases

this exists. bloomberg has a plug-in that lets you pull much of its data directly into excel using normal-looking formulas. the catch is you have to pay $20,000/year.

The ease-of-use of these modern "radio-controlled aircraft" is unprecedented - vertical takeoff, live video, intuitive controls - making them much more pervasive than ever before. That's why they're getting more mindshare - AND getting into more trouble.

This is a terrible article. It's just VCs talking their books. I hate the FCC's slow/fast lane proposal but you can't write about it only from the perspective of those with financial interests in the outcome (especially without making clear the importance of those financial interests).

It's cliche, but time to trot out the old Henry Ford line: If he'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

If you asked people in 2006 what they wanted from their phone, would they have come anywhere near close to describing today's all-powerful smartphones? They probably would have asked for better reception and a new version of Brick Breaker.

Felix conveniently assumes a startup has a binary outcome: Immense riches or ignominious failure. In reality, there's a spectrum. I know a lot of people who sold their company for $1 million to $10 million. Depending on how the cap tables work, this is usually not life-changing money but enough to average out to a really decent salary for 1-5 years of work, plus a job at a good company at the end of the ride.

This seems like a lot of work for a joke.

I've become skeptical about bitcoin for remittances. The biggest cost in remittance architecture isn't the electronic transfer, but distributing cash. Western Union, e.g., maintains a network of over 1 million agents - banks, post offices, dry goods stores, mobile top-up kiosks, etc. - so that recipients, often in rural areas, can collect their cash. Bitcoin does nothing to reduce these costs.

(Unless you're assuming recipients in Africa et al. will keep their money in bitcoin, which is ridiculous at this point, and will be for many, many years.)

Agreed. And hyperinflation is terrible when it happens, but quite rare in modern economies. Double-digit declines in bitcoin values are, however, quite common. It would be profoundly irresponsible to encourage the poor of Africa to make the switch at this point.