notjesse

This makes me think; what if you shorted USDT?

There seems to be almost no scenario where USDT becomes more valuable than the USD, and the worst case is it continues to be worth the same.

But there is a fair probability it becomes worthless, meaning that you gain from it.

While you need to pay premiums in the interim, for something with an indefinite timeframe, that risk seems fairly minor for the potential reward.

The other thing is earthquake safety. Wood frame is often far more resilient to sheer stress than concrete/brick. Concrete can be reinforced to mitigate that, but I wonder how viable that is for buildings on the scale of SFH, not major developments.

You could. At the same time, a new construction townhouse (and maybe even SFH) there is extremely limited maintenance work needed.

Plus, you don't need to be concerned with a HOA saying you can't rent your place out on whatever platform you choose.

They started ZO back in 2018. I think the bigger concern was the amount of growth and threat Opendoor presented them. There was a vision that they will fundamentally change the sector and make Zillow an equivalent of what the White Pages is to Google.

So yes it was FOMO, but not based on quickly appreciating real estate.

6% has been the norm in the US for a long time. It is absurdly high and is why opportunities like iBuying exist.

In the UK, there is no wiggle room for such ventures, but as the transactional costs in the US is steep, the market was ripe for disruption. You can usually expect your total transaction costs to be 8-10%, so there is a lot of margin in there for Zillow/Opendoor to operate as the only intermediary (buyer & seller agent, lender, stager, etc).

I would also argue a responsibility to their shareholders.

How much revenue would they have missed out on during this time? And how much will it affect their longer term growth?

If I were a Roblox shareholder, I would be pretty annoyed by the silence.

I believe that in a society that has free speech, there is a duty of the member's of society to exercise their free speech and disassociate from those acting unethically. Particularly for unethical actions that cannot be prosecuted due to the rights afforded to all.

Now while there are a lot of things that facebook probably can be prosecuted for, there are many things that they probably can't be. So I think we have an obligation to shame and shun those who act in reprehensible ways. And obviously in proportion to how culpable/complicit those individuals are.

I think if you were smart enough, you may be able to mask some needed changes under some legitimate tickets. You make certain changes that you know will break stuff, but you assign a reviewer who doesn't know enough about the particular thing that they may think it seems fine.

I am talking in a very generalized sense, not for this particular issue. But I don't think the code review/deployment process is entirely safe against internal bad actors.

Many will misinterpret it. We have seen how much the public can fundamentally misunderstand technical information over the past year.

People will just see that: 1. You can never disconnect your iPhone from the grid and stop it from being tracked. Even if you turn it off. 2. Governments, companies, and other (from the conspiracy theorist's standpoint) will be able find you whenever they want.

I am sure there are some legitimate security concerns here, but Apple seems to have taken reasonable steps to provide a pretty awesome feature which has solved a lot of risky edge cases.

Yes, essentially.

This is called speech mitigation, btw (Coined by pop-psychologist Malcolm Gladwell). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitigated_speech

I was admitted to Brazil 5 times under an allegedly expired visa.

I had no way of knowing it was expired, it’s not specified anywhere on the visa or in any Brazilian embassy/travel advisory site. But on the 6th time after it had expired, I finally hit an immigration agent who cared enough to turn me away or understand that it was expired. So this really tracks.

Shouldn’t Netflix be in favor of remote work for business purposes?

I would think there is a correlation between the amount of wfh across the world and Netflix viewership.

I remember my math teacher used to come around and take everyone’s batteries out at the start of an exam to clear the RAM. Little did she know you can just save the notes in ROM that persists power cutoff.

And that is why I donate to ACLU every month.

If the kids made serious contributions, that is one thing. However, that really doesn’t seem to be the case here.

Nepotism is majorly harmful. If their kids go into academia, they already have a huge leg up from having academic parents. Let alone if they already have a strong publishing record which they did not merit. You really harm those who don’t come from that background, which of course, is how class divide can become a chasm.

Stripe is an example of it. They do have a dashboard, but at the end of the day, without implementing their AI or stripe.js, there is not much you can do with them.

It seems like a great business model for engineers to try out ideas.

Agreed. It only sounds maybe 1 step removed from where aws lambda’s are now. You fiddle with the code in the lambda IDE, and submit for deployment. Is this really that much different?

I like that in Australia, retailers and others have to show the final amount. It seems that because sales taxes can't be known definitely for a given consumer at time of advertisement, certain businesses abuse this to include other unmentioned fees. Like resort fees at hotels. I would much rather look at a business' offerings and know immediately what I will be paying out-of-pocket. Federal sales tax could make that far easier.

That's a great way of looking at it! I've never thought of it like that.

I'm not sure it needs to be like that.

Most developed nations have a public health system. Akin to how the US has public schools and emergency services.

The revolution could be the government bitting the bullet, and spending a fortune on bootstrapping a public health system that undermines insurance and private health.

Yes, it will hurt that sector a lot, it won't happen overnight, it will cause huge deficits, and it will inevitably cause higher taxation. But it's ultimately what needs to be done. We just need to give up on the sunk cost fallacy and go with proven models.

That's the problem. As a healthcare consumer, there is no way to discern between costs of providers. Just that some are "in-network" (meaning your insurance works with them and they agree to your insurance's rates) and "out-of-network".

It is extremely difficult to determine how much things will cost in the US system ahead of time and there is no reasonable way you can "shop" around for better prices when it comes to healthcare.

It's like you go out for dinner, but the restaurant won't tell you how much things cost, just that you should definitely order X,Y, and Z. And all the restaurants in town have the same policy. You order it, and then they mail you the bill 2 weeks later. Only for you to find out the exorbitant costs. Plus, they decided to charge you for the extra ketchup you requested.

I kind of want these issues to continue and get worse. Because then we will have a healthcare revolution, rather than more bandaid policy fixes.

It seems like the US healthcare system is too far gone, and we need to hard reset it. Anyone who lives in another developed nation would be absolutely outraged if they had to deal with half the things Americans do when it comes to healthcare and the respective insurance.

I’m curious what people think this would mean for hiring? If all of a sudden there a 8 or 9 smaller, but still quite large, giants competing for talent, I could imagine competing for talent would hit fever pitch.

Almost all states are at-will. So severance isn’t required. But it’s usually for the employer’s peace of mind, it can prevent class-action lawsuits as well as former employees speaking negatively about them. Given they are a media company, a lot of the people laid off would be fairly good at getting lots of eyes on anything they say about Buzzfeed. It definitely makes sense for them to offer reasonable terms in the agreement to shut everyone up.

Gotcha, yes that makes more sense. I find a lot of unicorns are already doing this sort of interview, anyway. While I have never observed studies, it seems to provide better signals than white-boarding.

I agree with that. Sounds like a good process. Although, I am too cynical to believe any company that tells me this will be the only technical part. Too often do recruiters lie/misrepresent the recruitment process. Some seem to operate on the sunk cost fallacy, where you just see it through because what's one more round after already doing several?

But it’s not generally tolerated. You end up optimizing for sub-prime candidates because those are the only ones desperate enough to take 4-6 hours out of their free time for a company that hasn’t even bothered interviewing you, yet.

If they want to turn the onsite into one big work sample, by all means, that sounds very effective (and something I’ve seen work well). But in my experience, you’re going to deter qualified candidates by forcing them to do take-home assignments.

Do you have a source for that? Sounds pretty egregious.

There are other reasons to not pay off you mortgage, especially in the US. The two most prominent being:

1. Usually a certain amount of equity in the house is protected by state law (varies from state to state). So if someone sues you and/or you go bankrupt, no one can touch your principal residence provided your equity in the home is below the state's threshold. That is assuming you stayed current on your repayments and the bank is still good with lending to you.

2. No recourse loans. If you pay off more earlier, you are just opening yourself up to further risk. I'd much rather lose a bit on super low interest rates (and maybe a little in lender's insurance, too), than lose out if the housing market crashes.