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oneloop

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Come on...

WikiLeaks drops shit on Clinton, blame Russia.

Mayer does a terrible job, blame Russia.

Who wants to bet that next we'll hear Elizabeth Holmes blaming Russia for her silly Edison machines not working properly.

Hah good point. So Theranos is literally fighting for their lives, because if one investor gets 25% of their money back, all the other investors will want the same.

Basically, when she said "our machines, which we have already deployed in production and doctors are using them to make potentially life/death decisions, can do X". At that point.

How do you know that Madoff was malicious from the outset, I wonder? The guy had a 30 year career, have you studied his beginnings? Maybe you did, but knowing nothing I'd find it more plausible that the guy started small fudging a couple of numbers hoping the next year would be better and eventually snowballed out of control.

I don't think being comparable to Putin is good or smart.

I get what you're saying, but this has been textbook politics since forever. The most reliable way to rally people around you is convince them there is a great danger in X, and only you can save them from X. Every single politician does it. And it's easier if X is external. Clinton does it with "the Russians", Putin does it with "the Americans", Trump does it with "the Muslims and the Mexicans". In the UK Nigel Farage does with Europe/the immigrants.

I'm not saying that aren't some times external dangers. But these four characters I mentioned use this just as a political tool.

And this is was brought me to what I wrote at the top of this thread. This is very concerning especially in the case of Clinton/Putin, because when they've been using each other as a political tool eventually your population have been fed so much shit for so long, they actually hate the enemy country. And when that happens it gets even easier to start war. And that is really concerning :-/

Unit Economics 10 years ago

This comment contains more information than the article linked.

I was reading the article and the whole time I was thinking that the author would eventually say something substantive about unit economics. But no.

As far as I know from the debate, Trump does not adore Russia.

Yeah, who knows, the guy is a moron, I'm not sure he himself knows what his position on the subject is.

When I heard in the debate what Clinton wants; She wants to let Russia improve their nukes but not the USA's.

That definitely does not sound like Clinton. Reference?

Clinton Likes to call out Russia in public and calls for responses in public.

Putin does that all the time too. I think they're both posturing for their domestic audiences, who want them to be strong against the "enemy".

Well, I hope you're right.

I think that we humans find it hard to conceive such humongous changes in the world around us. We're used to a certain background in our lives and under-estimate the likelihood of any scenario that changes that a lot. Evolutionarily this makes sense: if you always think that the things you've never seen changing will never change, you will be right almost all of the time (and I could just as well call you myopic for not believing _my_ scenario).

But at the same time if instead of going with your instinct of how likely it is that such an outrageous scenario would occur, you instead follow simple game theory, there is only a few ways out of this situation, at least that I can think of:

A) The USA says We acknowledge your concerns and and actually, we're not gonna build that shield after all (or some variation of this)

B) Russia says Actually, I'm just gonna lay down and be bullied into irrelevance

Do you see either of these happening? Things will have to get much worse before either of these happens. Do you see other alternatives?

1.) you're assuming voting for hillary is automatic war with Russia. and would vote based on that single fallacy.

No, I'm assuming that hillary would be very similar to obama and bush. You're the one making the wrong assumption.

2.) You, being "single issue" voter, ignore that trump is a psychopathic, women-hating, racist, tax-dodging, russia-affiliated antichrist who will bring shame and destruction to America.

Like I said above, I don't ignore any of the things you mentioned, as I've been following the subject extremely closely. In all likelihood I'm better informed about how flawed Trump is than you are.

3.) You are so afraid of Russia (they're failing economically, politically, and technically) that you would vote a madman into the US office (doubtful you're american anyways)

I'm not afraid of Russia, I'm afraid of war. War isn't "we win they lose". More likely, we both lose. In any case, you're mistaken in saying that they're failing in any of the categories you mentioned. Russia was failing in the 90s. I guess you haven't been keeping with the world outside of your bubble since then.

You are the type of people that would vote in Hitler.

Aright buddy, just lost interest :D

Yes, I do care. I think morally there are circumstances where attack is justified, for example if one believes to be under very serious danger. Do you not agree with this? Another question is whether or not that is the case for this instance - we can discuss this too. But do you or don't you agree? And if you don't agree, do you apply the same standard to all the times our country invaded another?

This by the way was also the justification to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, whether the fears at the time were correct (they weren't) is a different question. But if the mistake had been honest, I would say the attack would've been morally justified.

Do you agree? (I'm just trying to understand whether you really see the world in black and white in which case I'm not really interested in talking to you, or whether you can see that some times circumstances can be quite extreme which might call for extreme measures, in which case I'd be interested in finding out where we're disagreeing.)

Dude, you didn't need all the citations. I am very keenly aware of every stupid thing Trump has ever said, probably. And I repeat that all of those things are secondary compared to this.

Unfortunately, I don't think war with Russia is outlandish at all. Like I said, for the past 10 years Russia has been repeatedly saying that the US's missile "shield" is threatening their nuclear capabilities (please please see [1], or you won't understand where I'm coming from). Obviously, there is the question of: do they really believe their nuclear capabilities are threatened, or are they just using that as a talking point? If they actually do, that's by far more dangerous than anything Trump can do. You know what happens if you corner a rat, right?

All I said is that the above is more important than Trump's idiocy. I'm not sure why you think this is a myopic view. It's not like I don't know about the things you mentioned. I know about them and took them into account. In fact, I've always said I'd vote Clinton because Trump is too much of a wild card. But actually... as things are, I'd rather take the wild card.

[1] If you're actually interested in informing yourself about this, start with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqD8lIdIMRo The bit I'm talking about starts at 4:00 to roughly 9:00.

Check out Trump's rhetoric: he admires Putin, he clearly doesn't want war. Check out Clinton's rhetoric: conflict.

I am embarrassed to say, but you've just changed my mind to vote for Trump.

I'm fundamentally a single issue voter. I think the most important problem is one that no one in the world is talking about right now: escalation with Russia. The situation has slowly been getting worse since 2002 when the US withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile treaty [1] and is getting worse faster.

I also think there's a massive misinformation from the US government about its interactions with the Russian government. What I mean is that the narrative that the US government tells its citizens is that anything that the former does is very well justified (eg bombing Syria) whereas anything that the later does is just because Russians are evil (eg invading Ukraine). Yes, obviously the Russian government uses the same misinformation on their citizens, the difference is that the US is much more successful at this game at the international level. The problem with the citizens specifically is that if two governments are enemies and they have the support of their respective populations... you can imagine what a small leap it is to start war.

Yes, Trump is a racist dimwit, but I think that is secondary compared to the consequences of more war.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty

If you're British you're likely to have a bias but less so.

Explain to me again why if you're British you're less likely to have a bias?

A British citizen-only would not have a conflict of interest as such.

Ah, so it's not that British citizens don't have a bias, it's that they have a bias in the direction that interests you. Very different.

There's so many things wrong with what you said.

A) It's not true that people "splurge" it on adwords. Adwords gives you a finite amount, so you have an interest in being as efficient as possible, at least if you care about your cause. Also, the effect on bid pressure is greater if you bid the same as the nr 1 bidder than if you "splurge it" by bidding $100/click, see D)

B) trials are like £75. Once you spend it, it's gone. You can't get more. It's not gonna bankrupt your the competitors.

C) Non-profits can't "pour it into really competitive keywords". They're limited in what they can do, they can't go bid on life insurance with google's money. They're also limited to a maximum bid of $2/click.

D) Regarding jacking up the price being a real benefit for google... This one is more complicated but you can't be sure without looking at the numbers. Because on the one hand you increase competition, but on the other google only get actual revenue from N-1 ad slots.

You're just guessing.