671 karma · joined November 23, 2011
Then when the managers ask them to speed up the site, they literally can’t do it.
As Apple tells it, they do not foresee merging MacOS and iOS, as the user interface is to different.
Microsoft is more willing to ship products with bad UX, and power through based on their market position, and willingness to stick with it until they get it right.
I cannot see Apple, as it is, releasing something like Windows 8.
The other thing is that iOS is the money maker. Even if iPad doesn’t sell as much as it might, it supports the critical mass of the iOS ecosystem, which is a vulnerability for Apple, due to much smaller market share.
Because our personal data is incorporated into a highly networked system (the various ad platforms), is worth much more than if it isolated, or “decentralized.”
Unless a new system, that allows individuals more fine grained control over how their data is designed to aggregate with mass numbers of other users’ data, this personal data will have a marginal value approaching zero.
This implies that other means of financing the vast client-server system,that is increasingly dominant in the first and second world societies, will have to be found.
It will also require pretty restrictive regulation to prevent companies from simply proceeding as they are, aggregating mass quantities of user data, from which they profit.
While awareness of the problems, potential and real, is slowly dawning amongst the “civilian” population, it is a confused and ill- informed type of concern.
I’m thinking of friends who get upset at learning the government is spying on everyone, who simultaneously post countless intimate details of their lives on Facebook (or Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)
Most of the time, I tend to think as long as good basic care is taken of kids, they can work out all sorts of weird child rearing environments just fine.
Something that has given me pause though is the astonishing addictive power of the various “screen” which occupy so much attention. Unibiquitous telecommunication is something new in human history, and it really grabs hold of people, the young as much as anyone. My concern is that our highly tuned psycho-physiology has not evolved to handle the type of activity, and it’s distorting our consciousnesses, and ability to pay attention, in ways that are unhealthy.
(Similarly to how humans have a hard time with too much access to processed food with high calorie amounts.)
Our lived environment now includes a whole different element, that of being ever connected in the present to a global information network.
This means that there is a real loss, to society, of the utility of previously physical common spaces. People derived meaning and value there, and it has gone away.
Losing something meaningful and valuable is sad. The fact that it happens a lot doesn’t make it less so.
Obviously, the WWW offers all sorts of opportunities to create meaning and value, perhaps more.
But something fundamental has changed, in that we now engage in important social activities through telecommunications and mediated is experiences. This is devaluing sone types of social infrastructure that previously provided these functions.
I think we have crossed a “social singularity,” from which there is no going back. Similar to other technologies that changed human societies profoundly, and permanently.
The other I was trying to recall what it felt like to “not have the internet,” and I couldn’t get the feeling back, even though I lived half my life like that.
Bittrex does not have a USD-USDT pair available for regular traders. They are literally just testing this service this week with a limited pool of users.
Here’s what they are said in what is the most recent post on their news blog, May 31, 2018:
https://support.bittrex.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004397871-B...
>During this first phase, fiat trading will be limited to approved corporate customers in the United States located in Washington State, California, New York and Montana. Qualified international customers may participate in the market as well. Like all customers who want to be active on Bittrex, fiat customers will be required to submit to both the standard registration process --including proof that they are operating in qualified U.S. or international regions -- as well as other specific fiat terms and conditions.
You are trippin’
As to who might have a vested interest in maintaining the appearance of the dollar-tether peg, come on. That’s not too hard to figure out.
I read Lee Smolin’s “The Trouble With Physics,” covering similar terrain, and his book was not presented as a work of science: it was rather a book about the sociology of science, and how the structures in place controlling the resources for research were going astray, by continuing to support, professionally, work in areas that were not proving fruitful, and limiting resources that might go towards finding new solutions.
Lost In Math sounds very interesting, as the author has decided to speak with leading researchers about their work, at a time when the validity of that work is being questioned.
That’s a worthy topic.
But try putting a reusable cooling pack right on your body, it’s pretty great when you’re overheating.
Back mounted compressor that runs cooling pipes to your underwear, that could be amazing!
So you’ve exchanged 10m tethers for Bitcoins to users who can’t sell them back for dollars, which will greatly diminish selling pressure.
If you are wash trading, you are not giving up valuable dollars for questionable tethers, that’s the whole point of wash trading! Kraken could can just provide heavy discounts to the wash trader to minimize slippage to trading fees (which I think they do).
Skeptics of the conspiracy, scam theory about tether basically use as their main argument a variation of yours: the bottom line being the market, as it is, believes Tether is not a scam, or the peg would simply not hold.
The reasons individuals believe one thing or another is inscrutable, but the key to this scam is opacity by the entity that creates the tokens. As long as Bitfinex can maintain the belief that they are backing each tether with a new dollar, there is no way to tell if the 50million new tethers were printed from “thin air” or purchased by millionaires.
Once the house of cards is built up, the holders of these related assets have a strong motivation to maintain the belief that tether is a real dollar backed asset. That really helps keep the peg at unity, until it doesn’t.
One of the most absurd things about this, is that tether says they are under no obligation to redeem tethers for dollars. That alone is as serious red flag.
Right now there seem to be enough suckers who are willing to play this game of “musical chairs” and do whatever they can to keep the music from stopping.
A fundamental problem, in the entire “crypto” market is that it’s hard to get dollars to crypto exchanges. As far as I can tell, this difficulty is asymmetric: it’s harder to get dollars out of exchanges than it is to deposit.
In either case, it is hard to get an account with an exchange that can handle dollars, if you are not willing able to jump through the hoops of AML and KYC regulations.
Even if you are, exchanges like Coinbase (regulated, in US) or Bitfinex (unregulated, located god knows where) present significant friction in actually transacting with dollars. (See the relevant reddit forums).
In addition, transferring dollars internationally is costly. So, somewhere, people exchange their dollars for bitcoin, or whatever. They can then easily transfer these digital tokens to any exchange, even those that don’t use dollars (which are many).
When such a user wants to avoid exposure, they can sell their bitcoin for tethers, which they can hold or transfer between exchanges.
The question is where this Tether comes from. It enters the system via Bitfinex, who generates the tether token (their sister company manages the network and creation/destruction of tethers).
What people are suspicious of, is that Tether is generating tokens at will. They can then use these tokens to exchange for real bitcoins. They then avail themselves of whatever actual points of exchange they can to obtain real currency. Or they can just trade the bitcoin.
The point is, in a panic sell situation, the exits are very blocked. If you hold your own tokens (off exchange) you will be that much more screwed, as these blockchain based networks breakdown under load.
In some ways, maybe this lack of liquidity helps stabilize prices.
But the total crypto “market cap” is at least an order of magnitude greater than the total dollars invested. (This is a hard concept to grasp, essentially it is the sum of the last price paid for all tokens in the market place.)
If tether is being is being generated without dollars to back it, that means there is even less real liquidity in the market, and “Tether Inc” is scamming everyone buy siphoning of some of the real demand for crypto coins.
These digital “currencies” have so far only shown utility as a pure commodity for speculation.
This is all mathematically trivial to see. The thing that many skeptical market observers wonder is why the “bubble” hasn’t totally deflated. Bitcoin has shown surprising price stability between $6-8k for a few months.
There is speculation that market manipulation is the thing providing the support, including the shenanigans of Bitfinex and Tether.
Bottom line is that this is a (sub) zero sum game. Any dollars won have a balancing loss from another player. It seems highly likely that this already highly risky game is being “games” by entities that play dirty.
There is no possible mechanism by which these tethers can actually be redeemed for US $. The Tether company does not offer this service, which is incredible.
For someone to exchange their tethers for dollars requires them to have an account at an exchange that uses tether, with US dollar services, who reliably will let customers withdraw said dollars.
As far as I know, there are no such entities who are willing or able to provide such a service.
This alone should cause the tether peg to break.
It seems like this lack of liquidity (is that the right term?) would enable a dollar peg to be maintained at a much lower cost, through wash trading or other trading on an exchange like Kraken.
It's incredible to me that people are willing to entrust significant amounts of hard cash to this house of cards.
I guess some people have money to burn.
That startup sound is a great idea example of the importance of the utility of affordances in interface design.
After you’ve done something that might have hosed your whole system, the sound alone can bring a sense of relief that at least some life is left in the machine.
Because the stakes are actually kind of high for those making a living with their computer.
This is old school Econ 101, but I think it’s relevant. Know we have multiple options for knifes. How do we decide the best one? We let people decide for themselves, and price is the signaling mechanism as to where resources should be focused.
So we have a “market mechanism” for discovering quality, thereby making “market” an integral part of the system.
It could be done otherways, and markets have known weaknesses, especially for certain categories of goods.
But for many categories of goods it’s a very powerful system to spur and support innovation and entrepreneurial endeavors. So to call an essential part of a market bases system valueless does not make sense.
I think there is a strong case to be made that they add value. One issue they solve is simply the communication of the existence and value of said product in an increasingly crowded and noisy world.
To take everyone’s favorite example, look how Apple has consistently worked on their image and marketing, and how that expense and effort serves as a signaling mechanism to consumer purchasers of very complex products. Of course, Apple delivers the goods, consistently, and has built up a symbiotic system of communication and technology.
The two big differentiators Apple has used are there focus on design and user experience. It’s not hard to see how these areas of attention blur into the boundaries of marketing, customer service, and product development.
There’s something I think of as “coherence” in created things. When it’s achieved, to end user it might seem like nothing, because the effort put into the subtle aspects of the creation become “invisible.”
If you’ve ever attempted doing something even as simple as writing marketing copy, the difficulty of bringing focus, clarity, and effectiveness quickly hits you in the face.
A company that can execute these “non-technical” skills well is at least a good bet for executing the technical apsects as well.
Can anyone think of counter examples? Companies that talk a good game, set up outstanding business structures, and then consistently deliver rubbish?
Edit: your comment about the contined existence of merely adequate products, wouldn’t you say that there is a real issue of cost? A company could dramatically reduce bugs in software putting more testing into the product, hiring better engineers, but if people don’t want to pay the price, the product is not “better.”
There is a fundamental issue in economics, which is how to “value” things. Price is used as a proxy, because it’s inherently quantifiable, and the alternatives lead to highly contentious differences of opinion.
What you’re describing here, sales people lying about capabilities and then failing to deliver, is something that maybe happens in complex business to business transactions, where the product is a set of services and products that defy “apples to apples” comparison.
Again, the sales and marketing are integral to the product. I don’t believe companies will survive if they practice outright fraud on their customers. This is not an easy problem. For the example, simpleminded approaches like forcing government to accept the lowest cost bid on complicated products has tremendous downside.
FWIW, managing people, organizations, setting up deals, marketing...these are “hard” skills. What makes them hard is that the parameters of the “problem space” are almost infinitely complex, the work product is ambiguous, and often the involves the focused cooperation of people, who are notoriously unpredictable.
Managed systems comprises of “soft components” is a very hard challenge.
I’m in the market for a new mattress, and the other day on a whim I stopped at a mattress store (in real life). After I left the store, within an hour, I looked at a site I commonly look at (a political site), and saw a banner ad for the mattress store company.
In any case, it’s hard for me to believe that targeted advertising doesn’t work, because without it, I see adds in product categories I will never buy in.
People are no more rational about making small purchases than they are about providing the necessary funds through taxation.
I suspect most people intuitively grasp that having freely accessible public roadways is well worth the cost.
The continuing process by which otherwise functional hardware is made into trash simply because the market incentives don’t motivate the manufacturers to prioritize this is (borderline) tragic.
The way updates of operating systems require ever more powerful hardware drives me crazy. If prolonging the use of hardware was an explicit goal of the companies that make the operating systems, not only could a huge amount of waste be kept out of landfills, we could have devices whose performance increases over time.
My perception was that the principles determined that the market they were in, the audio/media authoring tools space, would not support a business of the scale that they aspired to, or perhaps that their investors expected.
They managed to position themselves as being a “dot com” company (not implausibly) and the stock price shot up 20x.
Efforts to build a business with potential to grow into the now sky high valuation centered around a strategy of media encoding. (Moving Media Online was the rather on point slogan.) Ultimately this proved not to be a viable business, but resources were diverted from the existing media tools product lines. This prevented the media software from capitalizing on some of the profound advantages it offered over competing products, and from staying competitive in the small and fiercely fought audio production space.
Similarly, though Vegas was excellent, and forward looking, video editing software, it never received the sustained investment required to break into the realms of the market leaders.
Eventually the company brought back some attention to the media tools product line, but the financial realities and missed opportunities to keep the software competitive forced the sale of those assets to Sony.
I always found it strange that Sony wasn’t able to do my more to get Vegas established as a leading video editing platform. I’m an audio engineer, so I’m not as familiar with the needs of the market, but Vegas actually struck me as being far ahead of other native video editing software. It was also very easy to learn and use.
I worked with Sonic Foundry as a sound designer, so my perspective is from the periphery. I’m sure the insiders would have a far more detailed description of the various branching strands of stories.
It’s nice to read Monte’s recollections of a fascinating time.
A recent example for me is some webpages seem to crash on iOS safari if I scroll to fast. It happens more on older devices. So I’m constantly trying to feel out the rate at which I’m scrolling. Carefully trying to balance the desire to scroll quickly with the desire to not crash the page!
One issue here is that many people I’ve observed using software don’t perceive the difference between “workarounds” for bugs and the using of the program in its intended way.
It just becomes this generic blob of behaviors required to “make the program work.”
That said, connecting this utilitarian reasoning to the guidelines of what research to pursue, never mind the moral aspect would lead to an impoverished field of science.
On the everyday perspective, if one is suffering from ill health, but not from poverty and malaria, the idea that concern for your suffering should be set aside until the numeric quantification of the suffering of other populations is brought in line with your own, lacks compassion.
Value systems that lack compassion defeat their own purpose.
KAJ is right that this represents a patronizing and archaic attitude towards the treatment that of their employees.
What is the intent here? Protect the poor little ladies from predatory players. Protect players from the devilish seductive powers of the females.
It begs the question of why the woman would have to leave, versus the player have to leave.
It’s one thing to have a policy of non-fraternization. This is just a demeaning way of treating adults, and carries echos of distasteful and unjust power relationships up and down the line.
I don’t even mess with the keyboard on my MBP, unless I’m actually mobile. Even then, I often drag along my preferred input devices.
It’s very hard to guage the relative weight of these different potential target markets. But, really, I’m dumbfounded at how many people I know don’t even know that the function keys are a thing!
This seems to be the cases with Windows 10, also.
Public shaming is such an archetypal behavior. My contention is that critical thinking is required to examine the content of the belief system that is the implicit subtext of the behavior.
All humans have a “belief system” which helps them function by providing a simplified, more manageable model of reality to conduct themselves in. Having a “belief system” is not some mere crutch, it’s an inherent part of ourselves, essential for our survival.
Challenging an individual’s belief system will provoke an anxiety response, and compensating defense responses.
I “believe” that not all belief systems are “created equal.” Some map reality more closely, some are kinder to the members of the society who create them. Some lead to violent conflict, some are conducive to cooperation.
The “content” of a belief system can be examined with cognitive tools that attempt to transcend one’s own belief system. (This is admittedly very hard, and imperfectly undertaken, at best.) Science is one such tool. Logic is another. An adoption of an empathetic stance towards an individual holding a belief system is another.
However, because belief system have universal characteristics, identifying something as a belief system does not provid much insight into the content of the belief system, and does not provide a basis for evaluating it.
I think that self-identified conservatives, and fellow travelers in the pro NRA crowd, have pulled off quite the disengenous trick, by deliberately exploiting a kind of category confusion: they have managed, at least in their own minds, to equate attacks, or shaming, of individuals based on their belief system, with historical oppression of categories of people, that were a whole different thing.
The worst type of oppression and discrimination in our US history is the racial oppression built into the fabric of our society. This oppression was not based on the “belief system” of black Americans. It was based on amplifying and exploiting a perhaps natural affinity for others like ourselves to systematically exploit, oppress, and persecute a whole category of people, based on an aspect of themselves (race) that a) they had no choice in and b) was irrelevant to the question of whether an individual had rights to live with even a modicum of dignity, health, wealth, and justice.
So we have “conservatives” appropriating the mantle of the oppressed, because they can demonstrate aspects of treatment that resemble what African Americans have had to deal with.
It’s ludicrous. The argument seems to be: historically blacks were treated with extreme deprivation. For example, they were not allowed to participate in the institutions of higher education. Part of this would of course means they would not have been permitted to speak publicly on a college campus, were it not for the efforts of many advocates of racial equality and fairness.
So simply the act of being restricted from speaking on a public campus, because they are (self identified) members of a group, in their minds equals unfair discrimination. It would be comical, if it didn’t serve to confuse and warp the civic discourse around this already difficult subject.
As part of that social rejection, the humans in the groups doing the rejection are likely engaged in some of the same intense, sometimes disturbing, behaviors, like “public shaming” that groups oppressing blacks engaged in. That’s human nature. The fact that two courses of conduct share a common motivation is not enough to evaluate the conduct.
Anecdotally, if you peruse the comment of social media/forum/comment sections of “liberal” and “conservative” sites, you will see the same patterns of smug self righteousness, and certainty that the “other side” are depraved, delusional cretins, who can’t see beyond their own hypocrisy. (If you havent tried this, do, it’s quite surreal...the archetypal patterns of social behavior and biases, of emotional tone, are strikingly similar on Fox News and Huffington Post.) Their are liberal trolls and conservative trolls.
Getting back to the subject of the OP, I suspect that similar category errors are at work when the subject of “censorship” on a website comes up in response to moderation actions. The simple act of suppressing speech in a public forum is not enough to label it “censorship.”
It looks like the Russians did try to influence our election, and why wouldn’t they. But I can’t believe any seriously thinks Trump is some kind secret Russian agent.
The heart of the issue is that Trump has worked actively in the shady parts of high finance projects. From what I can tell, his business conduct is shamelessly sleazy, showing little regard for anyone’s interests but his own. At certain level of wealth, entities can start to operate almost above the law. Their wealth protects them through the legal and political systems. It is this kind of conduct that is most disturbing, amongst the “elites” of many countries, including the US.
I’m thinking of the practices of the financial-military-political complex. The connecting thread is the pursuance of wealth and power above all else.
Trump is a bad person, and it always struck me as nearly impossible that he hasn’t engaged in highly illegal conduct. It’s just at his level, before he became president, he was hard to touch.
Ironically, becoming president opened him up to a level of scrutiny that is extreme. His usual legal defense methods likely won’t work. Whatever happens in this case, he has so many enemies, he will not get a rest, as long as he is in power. It takes something like a special prosecutor to go after a president. The authority and power of Mueller is politically based. It’s hard to attach the president on legal grounds, purely, but he remains vulnerable to these political attacks.
For anyone that still thinks the Russian issue is a “nothing burger,”I highly recommend reading this eye popping article on the activities of Paul Manafort. Manafort is a very bad guy, and deserves to be in prison. The level of cynical corruption Manafort engages in is sickening. He is certain very connected with the political and economic power structure in Russia.
Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager.
Put it together...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-ma...
Has anyone ever been prosecuted for making software, or using it, that was used by another in the commission of a crime? Perhaps there is existing law related to people who write and release software that was intended only for malicious use that could extended.
In the crypto/ICO space, the people getting into hot water have charges related to violation of finance and securities law.
Poorer members of the insurance pool have their premiums subsidized. From the insurance companies point of view, they are (theoretically) managing the pool and premiums using the same actuarial tools they used previously.
The rules about not being able to reject people for pre-existing conditions force them to broaden the set of (heterogeneous) members included.
The plans are provided by “health insurance companies.” The product you buy from them is called “health insurance.” The imaginary, purist notion of what you are declaring to be “insurance” is like a simplified model of economic theory you might find in a textbook. It’s used to gain insight about how an insurance product works. There are no real world example of “health insurance” that conform to your simplified definition.
Health insurance in the US has long included coverage for routine care, which already falls outside of your model.
I’m of the theory that the meaning of words is defined by how they are used in everyday language, not how I think they should be defined.
It’s related to what I think of as “coherency” and I’m often surprised at how long it can take.
The most recent example is that I was writing up some technical feedback for a reviewer of a product I develop.
My first draft was several pages worth of dense prose. I realized I needed to simplify, otherwise it would overwhelm the reader. I worked on it for several hours, and in the end I had it down to about 4-5 paragraphs.
So it took me five hours to write what looks like a simple, straightforward email!
I’m a music producer by trade, and the principal is very much at work. To create a successful recording requires getting into the small details of the sounds, and working with them, whether your tools are complex or simple.
Health insurance in the US is not conducted in any way like the over simplified, text book example you provide. There exists no real world example of health insurance that functions as you describe.
There is the obvious problem that there is nowhere near that level of precision in anticipating the given level of risk for any individual getting a certain disease, especially as most populations are fairly heterogeneous when it comes to health risk profile.
The insurance companies use statistical tools to estimate the average risk of insuring a pool of people with some element of similarity, like a pre existing conditions. This is a far cry from being able to evaluate the risk profile of a given individual.
The complaints people have about being rejected for coverage based on a pre-exsisting condition, when they think that condition doesn’t really make them that risky reflect the imprecision of the actual tools.
This is also illustrated by these blanket denials: insurance companies are rejecting populations that the feel cannot be adequately evaluated for risk.
There is another aspect of such complaints (about blanket denial of coverage) which come from the issue that some people simply do have a health condition that they cannot cover the expected cost of.
This is a societal issue, and different socities deal with it differently. It inevitably involves some sharp elbows between the various interests involved.
In the US, for historical reasons, a big method of covering the costs of those who can’t afford the full premium was through the patchwork system of employee health plans, complementing government run plans like social security, Medicare, Medicade, local government programs, and charitable programs.
As imperfect as the system is, it remains the case that the health care coverage of high risk individuals, meaning those who can’t cover the full cost of a risk based premium, relies on what is known as “health insurance.”
The idea of extending an insurance program into a mechanism for subsidizing those who can’t pay the premium does not mean it magically transforms the program into a totally different thing.
In the limited definition, it is still the case that the healthy pay the cost of sick.
The extension of the concept of insurance fits semantically, because it is based on the idea that there is an element of chance inherent in who gets sick; getting sick includes many factors that are outside the source of an individual’s contol (as well as factors that are within an individual’s control).
The ACA included a “tax,” among other methods to socialize the cost of covering the “premiums” for those that couldn’t cover them on their own.
The whole system relied on the same actuarial principles as the previous system to smooth out variance in costs to individuals.
Paul Ryan sounds like an idiot here, because he is a mealy mouthed politician, who doesn’t have the courage of his convictions.
Ryan is libertarian minded tool, whose real opposition to the ACA is not that the healthy pay for the costs of the sick. His opposition is to the elements of the program that force wealthier members of society to cover the medical costs of the poorer members.