brycehamrick

It’s conceivable FB could develop something like Minds where a platform-specific cryptocurrency (ie Libra) is used to buy views.

Carbon taxes could help, but end-of-life taxes on the producer would be more effective at actually driving change. The consumer doesn't have the decision making power to choose lower-impact materials in products or packaging they buy, but the producer does. If we tax them on the disposal cost and other negative externalities resulting from the use and EOL of their products those producers will likely choose different materials.

This is a really good point actually, insurance firms are already licensed and regulated. You could effectively implement a wealth tax simply through added taxes on insurance policies.

This only applies if it’s anti-competitive, meaning if the intent is to undercut and harm a competing business. Funded startups routinely operate at losses, the point is that for many business models it isn’t possible to operate profitably from the start-making alternative ownership structures challenging.

Open source projects at large need to move to decentralized, censor-resistant Git hosting. Some interesting projects in this area to watch are Ellcrys and Gitchain.

I take real issue with the unemployment rate claim. The federal U-3 rate is a politicized number that has over time been reduced to an incredibly narrow definition. U-6 is much better because it includes discouraged workers who have given up on seeking employment and part-time workers who want full-time (an increasingly large population). In 1994 the BLS changed the U-6 to exclude long-term discouraged workers which had the effect of lowering the rate. As John William's Shadowstats shows, when you adjust long-term discouraged workers back into the U-6 rate unemployment is actually well over 20%.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

I'm not a Yang supporter but this article is total garbage. Slate has been very disappointing lately.

The key takeaway seems to be while Yang says automation has displaced jobs there's a lack of academic consensus on the weight placed between trade policy and technology improvements; but everyone agrees both have had a significant effect.

Ok... so we shouldn't be coming up with a plan for how to address economic changes due to technology based on "it's historic effect has possibly been outweighed by other factors" even though we all agree it will continue to have an effect in the future?

Also just want to point out that anyone using the reported federal unemployment rate as a measure of overall employment health has already lost all credibility to write on the topic.

If you're going to make the energy-usage argument you'll need to position it against a comparable alternative, not how far you can drive a Tesla. How much energy does the current financial industry use on a per transaction basis? If you were to sum up all the retail banking locations, corporate offices, their data centers, contractors, POS systems, etc. would you realistically expect energy usage per transaction to be lower than a Bitcoin transaction?

Upcoding is extremely common and almost never comes with any consequences. It's routine for staff at the hospital to add line items for things that never actually happened. I've personally seen procedure codes for neuropsychological testing in the ER when the staff never completed those exams, as an example. The billing codes require very specific actions to have taken place in order for the insurance companies to reimburse. It's not often done out of malice, the codes added are likely what should have taken place but the hospital staff are overworked and end up cutting corners.

Potentially something they're working on for 2021 https://9to5mac.com/2019/08/05/iphone-face-id-touch-id/

That appears to be one exchanges policy, not law. There may be a law I'm unaware of but in any case this wouldn't come into play using something like LocalBitcoins. Exchanges need to do this in order to conduct transactions with banks—obviously something that isn't needed for unbanked populations.

Of course they have money, just not a lot of it. They use cash and mobile credits, both of which have drawbacks like value fluctuation and the inability to accumulate savings. There's a good argument to be made that these populations stay in poverty, at least in part, because of a lack of access to banking.

Cryptocurrency exchanges do fall under KYC in the US and only if you want to do certain things, like purchases over a certain volume or fiat withdraws. There's no reason someone in India, for example, would need to go through a KYC process simply to buy a small amount of cryptocurrency. There's also plenty of P2P networks like LocalBitcoins that fit this use case much better than an exchange.

100%. Macbook has been my daily machine for 3 years now, love this little thing. Quite disappointed there's no option under 2 lbs anymore.

Reading through the criticisms my main takeaway is that (1) there's a severe lack of empathy for the segment of the world that doesn't have the luxury of a stable currency and developed financial infrastructure, and (2) there's some extreme misconceptions about both the technology and the economics behind Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. If your main point of opposition is that there's too much "hype" you're being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian.

I've come to the conclusion that advertising is the only viable monetization model for most content businesses. This is not a new phenomenon, this is the same reason advertising is dominated television (even paid cable channels), print media like newspapers and magazines, and even in sports. The economics of it are pretty straightforward—customers simply don't value most content at what it costs to produce it.

I do a good amount of media buying and content production. From where I stand, the issue is in the consolidation of power. Content discovery and ad placement are far too closely related, which is bad for everyone involved (well, all but the ad platforms). Going directly to publishers is possible but difficult, it's not currently a scalable solution.

I've hired dozens of developers and I do use take home assignments but primarily to weed out obviously unqualified candidates. My objective is to keep good developers interested through the entire process but arrive at a "no" decision as early as possible. My take-homes typically take qualified developers 15-20 minutes to complete but require some amount of research to complete (e.g. third-party API documentation). I've found that if you ask too much of candidates too early in the process you lose a lot of good ones.

I just took my MacBook Pro in for butterfly keyboard issues and was quoted 5-7 business days, and I have coverage under Apple Care. I haven't taken it in yet because I mostly use an external keyboard and that would be extremely disruptive to my work, maybe I'll try again and see if they can do it in store.

Yeah definitely not how I would talk to the employee, but it's extremely frustrating that they don't get it. As a business owner you can literally be losing money on a deal and have the employee assigned to it tell you they want more because they're only getting X% of the total contract amount. Only way I've found to protect against this is to keep the operations team from having visibility into finances.

I'm a business owner, and I've had disputes with employees based on our gross collections vs. the employees pay MANY times, the reality is this: Your value in what you do is based on what the market is willing to pay you. It's not based on what the market is paying ME for work you're contributing to. Your pay isn't based on my gross collections minus costs. No part of what I collect from customers are you entitled to. I hired you for a job, at a rate we agreed to, and if you believe you are owed more I welcome you to see what the market offers you.

How could you possible draw any kind of line in the sand on how closely the advertising needs to be to the product being advertised? I don't think that's possible. For something tangible, like an iPhone, sure. Show the product, talk about its features, whatever. But lots of things aren't that tangible, or if you talked about them that way the people who saw the ad wouldn't even understand what was being offered.

#1 rule of sales is that people don't buy products, they buy transformation. The product is the tool to get that transformation, so it's often more effective and more relevant to pitch the end result (which can be something immeasurable like a feeling) instead of the actual product. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

The issue here is different entirely. It's making a person a brand rep without their consent, because they're conveniently deceased.

The Venn diagram of business models that lend well to VC and those that are possible to bootstrap has a pretty thin overlap. Generating cash early isn’t often possible with products that have an enormous market potential. It’s rare for an SMB to break through to a major market without outside capital as well.

Pure FUD from someone who has no idea what he's talking about. Getting hung up on the market price over just the past year, by an economist no less, is just willful ignorance.

The "job" as a foundation of modern life is the result of the industrialized revolution and, while it served its purposed, is something we need to abandon as quickly as possible. Corporations don't have a monopoly on economic value creation. We should be, as a government and society, encouraging independent tradesmen/women, entrepreneurship, and artisanry. If we can manage that, job loss due to automation is no longer an issue.

'...people, who in her terminology were “passing” as workaholics, received performance reviews that were as strong as their hyper-ambitious colleagues.'

This is the takeaway from the article. Hours worked != delivered value. One of many reasons I've always steered consulting engagements towards another compensation model, e.g. weekly retainer fees.

DNS as well as registrar, which may be two different entities. You can either change the MX with the DNS host, or you can change the nameserver with the registrar.

Yeah I'm referring to an @gmail.com address. I'm pretty confident in Google's ability to secure that.

Is it more likely that your DNS host or domain registrar could be compromised or that Google might shut you out of your account? There's risks with either decision, personally I put more trust that my Google account will be there than in my registrar's security.

Yeah I completely agree this is something that needs consideration. I do have an email address with my own domain but for security reasons any accounts I create are tied to my gmail address. I've known too many people who have had personal domain email addresses intercepted, particularly through compromised domain/DNS settings. One simple MX record adjustment could mean every single bank account, social media profile, etc. all can be taken over.

In several US states having a law degree is not a requirement to practice law, there's other avenues to become a lawyer. Rare, but it happens.