tomkarlo

That depends if you believe Spotify users will switch to Apple just for that feature... if they won't, Spotify can likely still charge extra for it. Folks are pretty tied in to ecosystems at this point: if you've bought audio hardware that supports Spotify but not Apple, you're not going to switch.

Spotify hi-fi was announced a few months ago and is launching soon.

The EU (and Japan and Australia) has a range of rules now for increasing pedestrian safety, including softer materials on the front bumper, hoods that give so that they cushion the impact if a pedestrian is hit, and limiteing sharp protrusions / edges on the front of the vehicle. The new G-wagon, for example, has turn signals that flex down into the vehicle on an impact. https://www.autonews.com/article/20120423/OEM03/304239967/eu...

Yes, I completly disagree with your sweeping characterizations of entire genders, on both sides of that discussion.

A key part of the problem is that society often propogates such sweeping generalizations to children, reinforcing existing biases based on stereotypes rather than individual merit. This is part of what diversity policies are intended to address.

" It is a very feminine point of view to believe that one has intrinsic, objective value."

I think you need to take a while and consider why you believe that statement is true, and how it might be impacting the rest of your view on this topic.

Have you contemplated that you might be in the wrong here, and that your approach on this topic is very, very heavily based on your first person view?

It's extremely hard to control for the success of corporations vs. any single factor, much less "gender balance". For example, more male-founded startups get funded - but it's been shown that's in large part because they're male (not to mention their investors usually are), not because of any inherent merit of their business. Similarly, consumer startups often have an easier time getting funded because they're easier for partners to explain the rest of their firm, but it doesn't actually mean they're better investments than an niche enterprise play that's harder to explain to a layman.

More starts = more exits, more role models => more male founders and more all-male startups. Nothing in that cycle actually proves that that men are better at founding or running tech startups, and say "show me the data" is a poor response, given that we don't have an alternate universe where there's no gender bias feeding into those patterns.

Medical bills are (according to some studies [0]) the leading cause of bankruptcy in the US. So not only do you have to recover from a serious accident or illness, and maybe the loss of work time associated with it, you also are left with either a crippling level of debt or the total loss of your assets, plus a lien on future income.

Additionally, the less money you make, the worse coverage you probably can afford, leaving you even more exposed.

You're absolutely right that it's insane that Americans talk about this as if it's just the only way things could work.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148

You don't need to fork it, or mine it. You just use a smaller amount.

My point was that other traditional "store of values" have inherent value based on their utility per amount, which means that the finite supply has implications for people who want to use it. Bitcoin doesn't have that - it's purely useful in terms of what you can trade it for (much like a dollar.) Hence the fact that there's only so many "units" is kind of uninteresting, because a fractional unit is no less useful.

Yes, but people argue that the finite supply of Bitcoin is a fundamental advantage vs. currencies. The supply of a currency isn't really infinite, but it's quite flexible when you consider that giving credit effectively "creates" more currency and expands the monetary supply. (I'm not clear why BTC won't eventually have this issue as well if folks start lending / borrowing it.) All the BTC really avoid is increases in the monetary supply via the printing of additional currency, which is arguably a feature of traditional money, in that the central government can intentionally tighten or ease the monetary supply to help manage economic volatility.

What he said above: unless you have a long or short position, you don't care whether you get a full unit or some fraction thereof.

There are some elements of behavior economics that counter this - people like to buy lower-priced coins and stocks because they get "more" of them, from a unit perspective. But rationally, there's no reason to consider 1 BTC @ $10 any different from 0.1 BTC @ $100, hence the number of "units" seems potentially irrelevant.

There's an infinite supply, but there's non-zero cost associated with accessing incremental units in that supply. (And some would say diamonds are an artificially constrained market anyway.) With crypto, there's arguably an unlimited supply at zero cost.

Obviously, nobody can predict the future, but the whole point of talking about what's likely to happen is to make reasoned guesses based on the best available data and economic models.

The nature of a hedge, in particular, is that you do it before a market downturn, not after. Once the market has dropped, you want to unwind that hedge, which in the case of gold or Bitcoin means selling. If you look at gold's performance during recessions since we unlinked it from the dollar, it's as likely to decline as rise. That makes it a poor hedge against recession.

In terms of supply and demand, it's true that supply is constrained, but that's only half the equation. Demand is extremely volatile, as there's no inherent "consumption" of crypto currencies (aside from lost wallets and other breakage), not is there any production occuring that requires btc to continue. The demand is entirely composed of people buying it with the expectation of a future sale at a higher price... that's speculative demand, and it's not a stable or dependable type of demand.

The problem isn't that it's unpopular, it doesn't seem (from the post) like you have some kind of underlying economic or financial principle supporting your argument.

* why would it have an inverse relationship with other assets? It's not a short. It's still valued based on purchase price vs sale price, adjusted for risk. If risk has risen and nothing has changed about purchase or sale price, why would it rise?

* if Bitcoin was at a market-clearing price before a downturn, and other assets are now much cheaper, why would BTC then be comparatively more attractive in terms of expected investment returns?

It's an interesting question, but rationally it seems like BTC should decline during a market crash / recession. It's arguably a way to store value as other assets decline, but given that it has no yield, the rational thing to do after that decline is over would be to cash in your BTC and use it to purchase those other assets that have declined, such as real estate, bonds or stocks, and now have either attractive yield or a strong potential for future asset growth.

(And you see this kind of rebalancing effect in general when a major asset class declines - eventually it pulls down other, unrelated asset types because as it goes down in price, it becomes a relatively more attractive investment.)

Is the supply really "limited"? Sure, there's finite number of "coins" that can be generated. But unlike physical objects, there's not really any special property of that unit. Also, you can just generate a new currency of more units and similar utility (as has happened many times recently.)

Objects in the real world have utility that's directly linked to their unit value. That's not necessarily true for Bitcoin... if it goes up 10X, I can just use 1/10 as much and get the same exact transaction result. So why is it "limited" from a supply/demand perspective?

Interchange rates on Visa are >2%, and there's definitely cards that offer 2% cash back on everything, with the exception they generally bar "cash-like" items like cash withdrawals and t-bill purchases, to avoid holders just churning purchases for the rewards. (There used to be a way to make tons of points for buying like $10K of t-bills on your Visa, then immediately reselling them for $10K, because the Treasury wasn't charging the interchange fee.)

I suspect this is less about the credit risk of the cardholders than the risk of unrecoverable fraud, although there's also the theoretical risk of some kind of fraudulent conveyance by the card holder.

Fraud: I steal someone's credit card and use it to buy crypto, then move that currency somewhere unrecoverable. The card company is unable to recover anything. (This can be mitigated by recovering from the exchange in some cases.)

Fraudulent conveyance: Holder maxes out all their credit cards buying crypto, hides it, then claims bankruptcy. Card companies can't recover anything. (Yes, you could do this with something like gold, but it would be a lot harder to hide and sell later on.)

Fair enough, but honestly this seems like far less of a problem than the large fraction of drivers who don't know how to turn properly in the first place, and just make that right turn without having merged into the bike lane.

I commuted in SF for a year, and I'd guess 75% of cars don't know why the bike lane starts getting dashed before an intersection.

I ride both ebikes and scooters, and while the ebikes are a better way to get somewhere fast (and I think, overall, safer) the scooters are generally a much more pleasant ride - you're standing up, you just kind of surf along, and you don't have a 30lb bike to deal with... they're magic-carpet-like.

The exercise benefits of both are... questionable. Even just cycling as a commuter on a regular bike isn't very intense exercise, and on an ebike it just seems like you're pretending to pedal. I can't imagine it has much health benefit aside from being better than sitting in a car.

At least in SF, they protect the bike lanes sometimes - no right on red, at least, when there's a protected bike lane.

Re filtering, is that technically against the rules? It's a single lane at that point, but in CA it's legal to share the lane if there's room. Seems like a cyclist or motorbike has the right to lanesplit and move up.

This is a bit of a stretch. There was a lot of work done on improving tablet support in K, L and M, including work to specifically support the Nexus 9 and Pixel C. There was also the addition of multi-window, etc.

"Looking out the window" and "steering the car" is pretty much exactly what current year cruise control systems do. Just go look at the Subaru Eyesight systems, which depend on cameras that face out the upper part of the windshield. https://www.subaru.com/engineering/eyesight.html

(Subaru's doesn't do active lanekeeping, but lots of other manufacturers like BMW and Ford do.)

The newer cruise controls have lane-keep assist and adaptive cruise control - you don't have to actively steer or brake. On an open road, there's effectively little difference from the Uber vehicle, which would also let you disengage autonomous mode by breaking or otherwise interacting with the controls. (The newest mass-market cruise controls are "stop and go", which means they'll even bring the car to a full stop, then start driving again.)

Both adaptive cruise controls and human drivers do this by default. If you're doing 60 MPH on a highway and something pops into the periphery of your vision that you don't recognize, do you slam on the brakes? No.

Not as many since they banned them here, but it used to be quite common given the combination between the fact it's pretty windy here in SF every afternoon, and there's lots of trash / debris around. It's still pretty common to see blowing paper or other debris (tire shreds) in the road at least a few times in my 12 mile commute.

This has been a not-minor problem for autonomous cars and the Tesla-style autopilots / adaptive cruise controls that depend on vision only. You have to program it to ignore some types of things that seem like they might be an obstruction, such as road signs, debris in the road, etc. so they don't hit the brakes unnecessarily.

Sure, but if you were on a highway, would you slam on the brakes? I hope not.

There's a calculation here of balancing the perceived risk of an obstruction with the consequences of avoiding it or braking in time. Drivers have to make this decision all the time, on a highway they will generally assume it's safer to hit most things than swerve or panic brake, because it's mostly likely not that dangerous to collide with.

At least one stat I saw from AAA is that ~40% of the deaths from road debris result from drivers swerving to avoid them.

Is this necessarily different from a car placed in normal cruise control (automatic throttle, no braking), where the driver is under the obligation to managing braking in an emergency? It seems like the human driver here was still under that obligation, but failed to act. (Possibly because they were distracted, but that's not unique to this situation.)

I'd guess that "unknown objects" happen all the time - it seems like that's the default until something is classified, so tire scrap or plastic bag would also fall into that category. If the car slowed down every time it saw one it would never get anywhere, it should only slow if the object gets classified as something you can't hit and is clearly in the path of the vehicle. Seems like that decision happened too late here, requiring emergency braking... which was disabled (!).

That doesn't help with the problem that the companies are trying to address, which is that their own employees and hires are having trouble finding housing.

That's really the problem, at least here in SF. The tech industry needs highly skilled employees, rather than local residents. So wherever they land, they bring in a bunch of new people who also need housing (and have high incomes.) I don't think that's inherently bad - but if your city has a bounded housing supply like SF, it's inevitably going to lead to rising rents and displacement of existing lower income residents.

(Contrast that with say, auto manufacturers, who would maybe bring in some managers when opening a plant but would also employ tens of thousands of locals, raising the incomes of the existing resident more than bringing in new transplants.)

Maybe to not the same degree, but the same issues - NIMBYism, a focus on SFH, a sense that established residents are pursuing housing policy that punishes younger / newer residents. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/03/upshot/zoning-housing-pro...

Let's play this out. You create a city of say, 100K, composed of employees from Google, FB, Salesforce, etc. Where do they eat? How much will housing cost given your average income will be several times that of a "normal" city? Do you spread them all out in single family homes (and have massive traffic) or do you force them to live in high-rises?

Where do the restaurants, and arts, and culture they need come from? Who works at those institutions, and how do they afford to live in that city? (Or do they commute from somewhere else?) How do you fund the international airport that's going to be a must-have?

I think it's possible, but I'm unclear how it would actually lead to a low cost of living. It sounds like most company towns - sprawling, lacking the kind of culture that people want from a city... reminds me of Plano, TX, where JC Penny moved in the 80s, or Bentonville, AR, or Sidney, NE (where Cabela's is HQed).

Companies would have a really hard time hiring highly-educated, high demand workers to move there vs being able to live in say, NYC, London or SF. It's not enough to just offer cheap housing - you have to offer a high quality of life, plus jobs for spouses, and good schools for their kids.