toasted

fellow econtalk/cumtown (well more red scare) listener here..

The latest feed refresh used to make me feel "Wow how will I have time to listen to all of these!" whereas now its "God do I really want to listen to any of these."

I guess previously we were all starved of interesting long form conversations (or socialist edgelords) but now we're reasonably satiated and like anything else it has to be good to hold our attention.

I still find a good econtalk pod is one of my greatest pleasures - russ & munger episodes particularly.

google sonostar, bargain a bit for a good price :)

Cool project :)

I just got back from shenzhen where I purchased a handheld ultrasound probe with built-in screen about the size of a really chunky smartphone for $1800 with wifi & connection to ios/android

Off-topic - but currently in India and the uber experience is absolutely amazing.

The handful of times we have used taxi drivers, none of them can find the place where we are staying even with written directions in english and in hindi or even with a hindi speaking person instructing them via the phone. There is always some niggle over pricing and whatever you pay them they claim you are shortchanging them.

With uber they go to the right place EVERY TIME, there is no haggling at all, they dont try to angle for tips but are very grateful if they get tipped. It is a complete gamechanger for travel in these areas.

This is fantastic.

Have there been tangible environmental gains from all the money being invested?

Take land - demand for it changes over time, the exact same amount is in circulation as there was 200 years ago, the value goes up as population increases and it becomes more scarce, why can't money be the same?

Nobody really knows how this ends, good or bad.

Efficient market theory is based on the fact that when you leave people to their own devices, they tend to do a far better job and be better off than if you try to help them. Basically everyone agrees on that.

So why do we accept efficient market theory for basically everything, yet when it comes to currency someone has decided that we need elaborate schemes of variable government decreed micromanagement in order for things to work?

In terms of keeping things simple and letting the market decide, the perfect currency would be global, unable to be printed or manipulated, of a fixed amount, so that external interference is impossible, and people knew exactly what they were dealing with at all times. The closest we have is gold (and maybe bitcoin).

Unless the investments bomb and no value is created eg. the clean energy investments of the last 10 years

Wait - but quantitative easing usually involves buying back government bonds (in recent times it has also involved buying riskier instruments like collateralized debt obligations (eg. bundled mortages from freddy mac/fannie mae))

But government bonds are issued by the government as a form of govt debt to finance the federal government deficit.

So doesn't that mean that money IS being printed to finance government deficit? It's just that it goes through a slightly convoluted path to get there?

Total vaporware.. consumers vastly overestimate the value of their own attention and assume it can fund expensive things like this. If it can be ad supported why do you need to pay $10 for the "app" via kickstarter?

Has anyone considered the grameen model of peer pressure lending in P2p marketplaces?

You signup with your facebook account, it records all the details of your facebook friends, and if you go into default on your loan for more than 3 payments then it starts contacting your facebook friends automatically and stating that unfortunately you were unable to keep up with your debts and could your friends chip in some money to help cover things??

the threat of losing face would probably decrease default rates significantly, therefore allowing a decreased interest rate to be charged.

So amazon's market cap of 144b is theoretical because they don't have profits? And bezos should be paid enough salary to survive but not so much that he is no longer "hungry"?

Because regardless of whether profit is there, they should be able to extract value if they want to.

Because the founders have created the business and have created several million dollars of value (based on the VC's own valuation). Why should they not be able to cash out for a lifetime of financial security?

Congrats. You guys have a great product and deserve your success.

Tomorrow Youtube or Twitch could expand their offerings to include your business model and you may find yourself irrelevant within 6 months.

I had a liquidity event last year in which I had the opportunity to sell either none, a part, or all of a holding in a product I strongly believed in for $6 million. I cashed out $2 million, kept 2/3rds equity. Since then, despite my belief in the product, it has lost most of it's value. I am very relieved (as is my girlfriend!) that I took (some) money and ran.

When you are young you can feel a sense that success is inevitable and you want to keep doubling down, but there are a truckload of people in their late 30s and 40s and 50s for whom things just never quite worked out who would give anything for the security that a couple of million dollars provides.

Just out of interest, is there a company which provides covert early exits for founders? For example I meet with a founder, they sign a contract saying secretly that they will give me a share of their equity in 2 year's time or whenever a major liquidity event occurs, and in return I pay them an amount based on current valuation?

Not to be overly emotive, but honestly, fuck Sam Altman on this one.

If a person founds or cofounds a company worth >5million, they should become a millionaire and have lifetime financial security. The VC already in all likelihood already has lifetime financial security.

VC's bank on an 80-95% failure rate, so they are basically sacrificing lifetime financial security for 9/10 of their founders in order to increase the likelihood that 1/10 will be a bit more miserable and therefore work harder to increase the chance of a big exit.

fuck them, take financial security.

sounds like somebody's girlfriend got pulled by a hipster

Big record companies support spotify because they have been given billions worth of equity in it.

Artists have been given no equity in spotify. They should pull their music and move to another platform offering ownership.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/354103174706185/

What would be the best way to integrate additional stuff into these facebook groups to replicate the features of Uber?

eg. Driver feedback, current active drivers, GPS coords of driver locations?

Altruism essentially never saves any ships. That's just not how the world operates. It's always about money. The only alignment that will work is more money going towards doctors.

In the (non-US) hospital I work we have a really exceptional bunch of general surgeons. 4/6 of them are work-a-holics, 3 work only in the public system (basically halving their salaries c/f if they did a day a week in private practice). They routinely work from 7am til 7pm, love operating, will come in on weekends when they are not on call to see and operate on their patients. The others do small amounts of private work but are still really focused on their public work.

These guys have some degree of martyr complex, some degree of being workaholics, enjoy the status in the community they get from being seen as hardworking altruistic surgeons. They get a truckload of work done and really provide a great service for their patients.

This is not universal but other departments in the hospital have similar personalities.

These kinds of people are the ones that keep a socialised health system going. I think they would really struggle in a for-profit health system because it is really difficult to remain altruistic and go beyond the call of duty consistently when you feel like others are not. When your colleagues are being lazy, when your hospital/insurers are trying to rip you off or tighten the screws, or forcing you to spend large amounts of time doing paperwork and claims. When you feel like you are having to bankrupt your patients by operating on them. All these things make you bitter and stop you caring and performing for your patients.

your doctor knew it was probably unimportant, could be caused by a myriad of things, and a repeat blood test in a few months would be normal and mean they could forget about it.

Because of the patient portal with its ability for patients to access info they don't understand the significance of, you were "absolutely startled" and "distressed". If you didnt have access to those results then you wouldn't have been concerned.

Regardless of all that, you should still have repeat LFT's because you don't know for sure that "strngth training" was the cause of the problem.

Honestly, Doctors find navigating the minefield of clinical decision making difficult enough, trying to make judgements on sensitivity/specificity of tests and investigations, positive predictive values, remove confounding, drug company propaganda, publication bias etc etc without patients trying to get into it all as well. Should I spend 1 hour explaining to every fucker with a headache why a CT head is more likely to cause brain cancer than it is to diagnose it?

The solution to the US healthcare woes is NOT more patient autonomy and decision making. The solution is moving towards a less money orientated system and trying to encourage altruism and alignment of patient's goals with doctor's actions.

Agreed.

Also, these types of studies always claim to have corrected for differences in confounding variables, but there are always more confounding variables than have been corrected for, and all they end up doing is a statistical comparison of data with a fewer but still significant number confounding variables, and if the sample size is big enough they will find a significant P value and try to imply some sort of causation/significant correlation.

The last person who tried a bitcoin based IPO outside of established legal frameworks and existing stock exchanges ended up having to renounce his citizenship, move to panama and was fined by the SEC

http://www.satoshidice.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Voorhees https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/2014/33-9592.pdf

they increasingly have decentralised aspects (eg. multisig escrow) and the new openbazaar is truly decentralised

A properly implemented reputation system works great. In addition to this the network could implement certification systems which allow trusted authorities to issue qualifications on certain drivers, eg. for those with a clean criminal record or those who have passed a local area knowledge examination

Facebook has a strong network effect in that everyone is on it and few regular people are interested in signing up for multiple social networks.

OTOH, rideshare drivers are incentivised to have as many (useful) rideshare apps on their phones as possible to maximise their ride volume, and customers are then incentivised to order their rides from the rideshare app with the lowest commission, and eventually a race to the bottom will result.

A robust reputation system using chain of trust scoring to reduce the usefulness of sybil attacks would rapidly result in reliable, friendly, safe drivers building huge amounts of positive feedback, which would then self-reinforce improved customer service efforts to maintain their reputations.

If the online drug markets can use reputation systems to ensure fairplay amongst the vast majority of anonymous blackmarket trades then local taxi networks should be able to manage it too!

It is only a matter of time before these outfits are replaced by decentralised, actual peer-to-peer networks, either running off blockchain technology or similar decentralised databases, with no house take and the only option for government being charges against individual operators. There is no network lockin effect when drivers can easily install a competing app and drive for no commission to anyone else.