slyfocks

I’ve wondered about this for years. Given the obviously misaligned incentives between a for-profit dating app and its users, dating seems like a perfect area for a non-profit to operate.

I actually find it refreshing that Wikipedia doesn’t cater to the lowest common denominator in the theory section of technical subjects. For sufficiently popular subjects, they often have more accessible explanations on their “Simple English” version of the page.

It is indeed a taxable event. People who exchange crypto for “stable”coins are generally doing so to stay out of the KYC banking realm so they can lie about their transactions to their country’s tax authorities.

And then everyone stood up and clapped.

One could argue that the airline CEOs acted rationally and strategically—they know the airline industry’s importance to the US economy gives them great odds of a bailout if a black swan event were to occur, so there was more value to shareholders generated by stock buybacks than reserving cash for a worst-case event.

I can assure you if tomorrow we woke up and the world was 2 degrees hotter and people were dying left right and centre from it, the same thing would have happened with climate change.

That’s the point he’s making though, we’re overcommitting resources to this problem because we can see it. Once climate change is apparent enough for people to panic, it’ll be too late.

Thousands of people are already dying from this in one small concentrated area in Italy, in a matter of weeks. Shall we just say fuck it and let thousands more die here too? Should the whole world say the same thing? Shall we let the entire economy hit the sort of fucked levels we haven't seen since like WW2?

Looking at the data from Italy, 98% of the people who died were retired, had pre-existing conditions, and were making no noticeable economic contribution. I’m not saying that economic utility should be what determines someone’s value of life, but the argument that spending trillions of dollars to save the lives of some 85-year-olds “avoids economic disaster” makes no sense. If a world leader were acting in a purely Machiavellian manner, they would let the virus run its course as quickly as possible so productivity could return to normal.

It’s quite alarming that no country (as far as I’m aware) is taking a more rational approach towards coronavirus policy.

Any attempt to make an argument of this sort in the current panic is being seen as insensitive and met with outrage (“you don’t care about me/someone’s parents/grandparents”).

If the consensus ends up being that we need to put an 18 month hold on all activity and spend trillions of dollars to extend the lives of a few hundred thousand octogenarians, this will be a mistake that resonates for generations.

Also, the current policy being pursued isn’t a simple “spend x, save y lives” trade-off. An extended period of isolation will not only have economic effects (greater poverty, on average, will reduce life expectancy for many), it’ll also result in a higher incidence of mental health issues and suicide. Children will have their educational development severely disrupted. When the calculus on this policy becomes clear, it could be possible that we end up trading many millions of years of aggregate future life to save a million people who’ve already lived very full lives.

I read it that way as well—-words do have secondary and tertiary connotations, and any competent journalist knows how to use composition and careful word choice to more effectively convey a particular narrative.

The Chicago metropolitan area is not only the third most populous in the U.S., it also has the third highest GDP by a fair margin.

More generally, it tends to be regarded as a much more global city than SF or DC. New York is clearly #1 as far as international importance, but Chicago generally places third behind LA in any serious ranking of U.S. cities based on economic and cultural importance.

Not sure why this is getting downvotes, it carries a lot of truth. Internet-based tech companies like Google have matured to the point where many innovators have left and MBAs have invaded, favoring short-term profit over user experience.

Lately, it has felt like Google has become more optimized for less intelligent/tech-savvy users (i.e. people who search using natural language e.g. “tell me the store policy for target please”). In these cases many of the words used are either irrelevant or counterproductive.

I’ve noticed Facebook’s search has started catering to the lowest common denominator as well. Searching for (made-up example) “Louis Potter” used to give all exact matches priority. Current results look something like 1) Louis Potter 2) Luis Porter 3) Louis Potters 4) Louis Potter (#2). I don’t like when search engines assume that I’m misspelling words/names, and it would be nice if they adapted for individual behavior in this regard.

They’ve hired specifically for this project, and based on the friends I know working on self-driving at Apple vs. Siri at Apple, the self-driving team has a much greater concentration of talent.

Patents are far from the only factor affecting innovation, yet you seem to conclude that patents are good based on level of innovation in the US.

A logically similar argument (“fallacy of the single cause”) would be: Hawaii has a relatively low rate of gun violence yet their gun ownership is high, ergo gun ownership must be fine.

Of course some patents are good, but as market concentration increases in the US, IP has become abused by entrenched oligopolistic corporations. Most recent reputable studies find that the US patent system has probably been a net negative on innovation of late [1].

[1] https://www.economist.com/node/21660559

Unless I’m missing something, timestamps seem to be HappyOrNot’s only defense against malicious users.

While that works against a toddler who relentlessly taps the unhappy button, it’s an ineffective defense against a manager intent on manipulating feedback.

My grandma bought some Bitcoin last week and she doesn’t even use the internet. Friends who are not tech-savvy are talking about Bitcoin often.

It most definitely is not still “pioneers and early adopters time”—that idea seems to be Bitcoin propaganda aimed at potential new Bitcoin buyers on the margin.

You cherry-picked one poor prediction from a single (shoddy) economist and somehow conclude that economists in aggregate are terrible at predictions.

That statement doesn’t even logically support a conclusion that Sean is terrible at predictions. It’s also entirely possible that Sean errs on the side of optimism given his 2007 prediction, in which case his alarmism over Bitcoin shouldn’t be immediately dismissed.

You’re making a false comparison between the period of mania in tulips and the entire lifespan of Bitcoin.

The cult-like “hodl” culture in the Bitcoin community exacerbating the already limited supply of Bitcoins (if it were a stock, it would be a “low-float” stock, which results in increased vol) has served as the perfect breeding ground for a bubble.

As Bitcoin becomes extremely mainstream, those who hodl Bitcoin with religious fervor are increasingly becoming a smaller minority. Eventually it’ll reach critical mass and there will be enough disloyal Bitcoin ownership to cause a panic at the first significant sign of selling.

I’m fairly certain it’s a bubble but it’d be foolish to short. Altcoins are in a bubble as well—Potcoin being valued at $64mil is just one of many examples of coins with zero or close to zero utility valued at absurd levels merely due to their visibility as a cryptocurrency (much like dot coms in 1999).

Ultimately, the mania present in a bubble can persist longer than one can stay liquid, i.e. Bitcoin could double or triple before the bubble bursts, which would trigger a margin call on a short position.

I can definitely relate to this. I was an early Ethereum adopter and mentioned it to friends fairly often when it was around $2. I’m usually pretty dispassionate around others, so my friends took my zeal for Ethereum seriously and bought a bunch of it.

Once Ethereum hit $6, on a market cap basis it felt overvalued for what was essentially an early stage startup. I was afraid it would have scaling issues with smart contracts. I convinced myself it was overly hyped, even though I now realize that very few people outside of my bubble had heard of it. I sold the first time it dipped from $6 to $3.75.

As soon as I sold, it started heading higher. Every day I told myself it was overvalued, and yet it continued higher. New coins that contributed nothing of value were suddenly raising tens of millions of dollars, so I refused to believe that the bubble could continue much longer. This was early 2016.

I then repeated the cycle with Monero—bought early, told others, sold early, missed out on 2000% gains.

Most of my friends have enough money to retire at 25 and while I’m happy for them, it’s definitely negatively impacting my mental health. Crypto isn’t my first case of bad luck, but it’s the only one that I’ve had to relive nearly every day—it’s practically inescapable with the current hype.

Try not to let it impact how you view yourself, though. You seem like an intelligent person who made a couple of impulsive decisions that ended up being magnified by hindsight.

You do know that trend isn’t sustainable, right? Bitcoin evangelists in 2017 seem to love talking about the rate of increase in price as if increasing in value by 300% every couple of months is a built-in feature.

In some cases, they actually contribute a novel feature (e.g. Monero adding features that enhance privacy).

In most cases (all but a handful), they add nothing.

It’s a money grab—so much so, that a somewhat self-aware crypto enthusiast created a parody coin, Useless Ethereum Token, whose sole feature was that it had none. It raised $40k in 3 days and was, at its peak, worth $160k, which is a pretty lofty valuation for a joke.

Thank you for being a voice of reason in a domain that has increasingly become overrun by frauds and zealots.

As someone who has been involved in blockchain research since 2011, it’s sad to see a promising technology (in limited use cases) turn into a buzzword thrown around by the many speculators and scam artists peddling vaporware and pumping crypto prices.

Profits are indeed fat, though (corporate profit-to-GNP ratio is at an all-time high) [1].

Also, there’s no reason to believe corporations would raise wages simply because profit has increased. This holds true especially if labor hasn’t been the impetus for increased profit (I’d argue that efficiency gains due to technology and an increasingly oligopolistic market have led to increased profit for large corporations in the U.S.).

[1] http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/531764dbecad0401113...

Apparently it has only trained on 30k songs thus far. This would explain the bias towards pop, as 30k is far too small of a training set to accurately capture the long tail of preferences.

This assumes venture capitalists don’t exhibit a bias towards male founders. Depending on the extent of bias (if any), female engineers would lose a bit of bargaining power with Google.

Also, empirically, women tend to be more risk-averse than men on average, so Google (and other companies) could be paying less knowing the chance they’d leave is lower than a man of similar skill.

Square Cash has instant withdrawal (and a much nicer design).

Venmo is commonly used in social settings to reimburse small amounts (e.g. splitting the cost of food ordered for a party).

Wire transfers are generally cost prohibitive, and even assuming no fees, it’d be strange (and more time consuming) to ask a friend for their bank details to wire them $10 for pizza.

This is an absurd comparison—major sports teams bid for extremely scarce talent, and they generally have the revenue to support large talent purchases (which have never been anywhere close to the price of Neymar).

No file storage startup with minimal operations needs or deserves this much money. They’re not in an industry with high initial fixed costs and they’re not labor-intensive like an Uber or Instacart.

According to a recent estimate, ~4000 times more energy intensive. It’s an incredible waste of resources for most current use cases.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ypkp3y/bitcoin-is...