Hongwei

Yes

1) The immediate impact is the retail and entertainment sectors, which employ a large amount of the population. The loss of incomes and consumer confidence from those people will cascade. They'll buy less cars and appliances. Car companies will in turn buy less [everything else]; anecdotally one of the world's largest automakers has called a worldwide stop to new purchases - of anything. This cascade will affect a majority of the economy. What made the 2001 tech crash bad was that all the startups that had other startups as their customers saw their revenues evaporate. Think about the 1000 variants of MarTech tools today.

2) More 1930s than 2008 unless governments act in a hyper competent manner. Ray Dalio has been writing about how the next recession will not be solvable through QE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raydalio/detail/recent-activity/...

3) No one knows

4) Currently: print money and worry about the consequences later. It's novel to see them "helicopter drop" cash directly to consumers. It's much more fair than just buying financial assets, which enriches investors first. (They're still doing lots of that, just not exclusively)

That's basically what it is. Another way to think about it is it's a way for the World Bank / WHO to buy insurance against pandemics. Sell high yield bonds that default when a pandemic happens.

Somewhat related - pandemic bonds will now pay out towards relief efforts and investors will lose their money.

Matt Levine does some analysis here: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-02-19/the-fi...

My limited understanding understanding is that it automatically releases funding (from the WHO and other bodies) to help with the crisis. It should also trigger some catastrophe and pandemic bond clauses, meaning investors who bought these bonds will lose their money as it now goes towards relief funding.

And it's quite scary if you consider the amount of methane stored in Siberia and northern Canada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

Canadian universities have had some questionable incidents around free speech [1]. So I wondered as I was reading this if this is, as the prof says, "cancel culture."

However there's this ... "Crockford is a signatory of the International Conference on Climate Change's 2008 Manhattan Declaration, which states that "Carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gas' emissions from human activity...appear to have only a very small impact on global climate," and "Global cooling has presented serious problems for human society and the environment throughout history while global warming has generally been highly beneficial." Between at least 2011 and 2013, she received payment from The Heartland Institute, in the form of $750 per month" [2]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsay_Shepherd [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_J._Crockford

Facing your fears is much easier said than done.

Ben has done it. His experience, and the way he describes them, speaks to me. His first book, the Hard Thing About Hard Things, is therapy for founders. I don't think he's trying to prescribe anything new.

To paraphrase something that stuck with me: "the mechanics of starting a business are easy and can be taught to anyone. the emotions involved are very difficult and it's [Ben's] job at A16Z to help founders deal with them." I really appreciate what Ben is doing.

I think SpaceX is private and has healthy positive cashflow, so this shouldn't be a factor?

I think the shenanigans they were pulling (crazy governance, conflicts of interest enriching the founder and wife, bad acquisitions) were obvious to the HN and analyst community, but possibly they hoped it would be over the heads of retail investors.

Now obviously, in this case, it was too blatant and stunk bad enough that even retail investors shied away.

Even simpler: it's fraud and they got caught. Hopefully it doesn't paint other great IPOs in a bad light.

Anecdotally, no one in SV ever believed in WeWork except Softbank. I couldn't find anyone to take the Bull case on WeWork, whereas at least some people could argue Uber had a real business model that depended on self driving cars.

WeWork, and Theranos before it, are not really the norm in SV. But SV and the tech ecosystem in general has a culture of "money talks," so when Softbank and Kissinger start backing these ridiculous companies, people think "well, good for them?" and move on. Skepticism towards WeWork's model has been the conventional position since Day 1, but no one is going to argue about the validity of Masa Son's dollars.

Great point, your analogy is better.

I live/work in Waterloo and regularly ask a favour of the Quantum Nano Centre folks at UWaterloo for a tour. Every time I look at the "computer," housed in a gigantic facility where each qubit has its own liquid nitrogen cooling unit and who knows what else plugged into it, and think to myself - I'm staring at the vacuum tube of quantum computing.

Yes, you can scale up vacuum tube computers to solve meaningful tasks, but it was barely more cost effective than human "calculators" except for specific applications. I think the same analogy applies for modern day quantum computers and classical computers.

I worry any owners will develop a pathological hatred of specks of dust.

"The proposal opposes nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage technology." Ugh

It could be the most complete business model they've defined - that and interest on Libra deposits. Surely, the value of creating a new global financial payments platform and being the incumbent/biggest player will be fully realized in yet-to-be-imagined ways, but it would obviously sound bad for them to say that in a Senate hearing.

How big is this GDPR fine going to be?

It seems to have been hugged to death (at least for me in Canada)

Not sure how many here would have used BBM or BlackBerries, but it was iMessage _years_ before iMessage came out. And for a few years after the iPhone, the network effect of your contact list on BBM was the main reason to keep using a blackberry.

I haven't touched the app (or the phone) for 6+ years now, but as someone in Canada, I'm sad to see this go.

I was shocked by how much the Airpods cost, and yet still ended up buying a pair. Have been absolutely delighted. I guess I wasn't alone!

I recently asked the founder of a pretty big GIS company how they handle plagiarism. The answer: "we don't bother. [we just monetize services on top of open data.]"

So it looks like the intentional errors method didn't work out in the end. [1]

Wonder if Apple will be as accommodating though :p

https://www.gislounge.com/map-traps-intentional-mapping-erro...

Wasn't Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan CEO) a vocal skeptic of bitcoin and crytocurrencies a year ago?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-12/jpmorgan-...

Curious to see how this goes. IANAL, but wondering why it's taken 3-4 years for this claim to surface? Is there a statute of limitations on IP infringement?

If I'm Ford, I surely would have triple checked every IP angle before putting a new technology in every single vehicle I make. So I'm just guessing that there was some original arrangement which now looks inadequate for the inventors. That or Ford's lawyers messed up in a big way. Just speculating of course.

Am also confused by this (and hoping this comment would get some love!)

Nothing in the article is substantially new, as someone who's been following this story closely. Perhaps coverage of this story for you as (presumably) an American is lighter than it has been for us up here. That's okay, and I wasn't speaking for you when I meant "us Canadians." Sorry.

Can't argue with that. Thanks for correcting my fuzzy memory! In the same vein, this still removes the "we can always take our business over there" card that our PM was waving around.

If you read the story, the major event is the case against Huawei CFO Wanzhou Meng. She was arrested in Vancouver per a US extradition request back in December. Most of this new article is providing background on the charges against her and then talking generally about potential cyber risks of Made-in-China silicon.

Here's the Bloomberg article dated December 5th. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-05/huawei-cf...

That has since ballooned into a huge diplomatic crisis for Canada, which has had it's citizens arrested in China and subjected to sleep deprivation interrogation and who knows what else (can't find source. read somewhere). There are active calls for our national telco's to ban Huawei's tech in our 5G infrastructure. The latest round of controversy was when Telus, one of the three major cellular providers, publicly endorsed Huawei and confirmed it will be moving ahead with their hardware purchase.

So yes, for us it is old news.

Speaking as a Canadian, this is already old news for us. There have been lively debates over on /r/canada, which went very one-sided (understandably) after China arrested two Canadians as leverage. [1]

As someone who likes to follow geopolitics, I can't help but wonder if the timing of this extradition request was strategic. When Meng was arrested, Canada was in the middle of NAFTA/USMCA re-negotiations and our Prime Minister was publicly musing about diversifying our trade partnerships, specifically focused on engaging with China. The automatic arrest of one of China's "royals" per our extradition treaty with the US was an extremely effective way of erasing our only major leverage on that negotiation.

IIRC the charge of bank fraud for business dealings in Iran was largely unrelated to Huawei's (sketchy) telco business. Kind of like how they got Al Capone on tax evasion.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/world/asia/michael-spavor...

From the blog, a "syndicate" situation sounds like when investors around the table are of relatively equal size and power. In that case, a consensus is required to move forward.

My guess is Softbank at Uber owns the largest single stake and has the deepest pockets to fund further growth. They bought out part of TK's founding stake iirc. That means they can probably dictate terms unilaterally if investors needed to put more cash in and would also have a veto if external money was involved.

(This is just my guess based on news and I have no inside info)

If the HN crowd is representative of tech generally, they won't have many applications with this administration. I do think there are really cool problems to solve in what is surely the world's largest organization.

Very ironic to me that IBM is the main company mentioned. Their Phoenix payroll system debacle has cost my government (Canada) 1B in write offs. Thousands of employees their homes after failing to get paid for 12+ months. [1] To me, IBM no longer qualifies as a tech company. Government will be the last to realize this unfortunately.

1: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/29/canada_phoenix_payr...