276 karma · joined October 5, 2017
This deal makes a lot of sense for Salesforce. They should be (and are) on an acquisition spree.
But if I had stock options (or any kind of locked-up equity) in Salesforce, I'd be worried right now. Someone is going to be left holding the bag.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14941564
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10567261
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774715
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12296347
The posts are chronological, so you can kind of see the idea developing in Mr. Rochefort's mind.
Does each branch of the tree get the entire block reward? If so, then you've going to have an explosion of branches.
If not, and each mined block earns, say 1/Nth of the reward for N branches, then you most likely go back to a single chain of single-block merges, because each miner is going to try to force N back toward 1.
You also need to address the incentives around mining the merge block. If these incentives are not drawn from transaction fees, then you are forced into an inflationary currency.
In other words, the industrial revolution can't happen unless there is a broad base of consumers driving demand.
So to the prediction that "the rich get richer until a big war or revolution resets things", you might be able to add, "or the rich decide that they can secure future riches by sharing present-day riches".
In effect, they are investing in the growth of a strong consumer class to cement the demand for the widgets their factories produce.
That said, the goal is for shares to have a nice upward pop when they hit the open market.
This helps encourage a broader based of shareholders, protecting against the case where a big shareholder decides to dump all of their shares.
This also helps in the case where the company comes out with bad news in the near future. Shareholders who make money are less likely to sue.
But if you don't like the price, just wait a minute.
Early investors look less foolish with each additional round.
If you were one of the VC firms in Round A ($50M), Round B ($542M), or Round C ($793M) would you come out and say, "Yeah, we were hoodwinked." and invite professional blowback?
Or would you help Magic Leap with their next round of investment, until so many big names were on board that nobody could blame you for jumping in?
If we're talking about doing a specific task within a well-defined framework, computers are already proving to be superhuman. That includes image recognition beyond ImageNet, as well as games like Go.
But yes, if we're talking about a generic system, then humans are better. And I think they will be for a long time.
And yes, I agree, there is a lot of noise and sizzle around AI (but there is also quite a bit of steak there too.)
And I, for one, am confident that Wall Street will accept the limits of their intelligence and introduce software constraints that require human oversight for the benefit of market stability. /s
Seriously though, any system with many actors is going to see unanticipated failures resulting from runaway interactions. There is no way around it. And I think that if the threat of losing money isn't a powerful enough incentive to stop it, then nothing is.
Secondly, the number of jobs requiring thinking in an ill-defined framework these days is shrinking rapidly.
This is not specifically caused by machine learning, but rather by the desire for predictable timelines / cost savings / metrics gathering. But it has set the stage for AI automation.
Take law and health care, for example:
* Law firms are consolidating, and lawyers can now spend their entire career working on one small, specialized aspect of a field.
* Primary care physicians barely are allotted just enough time to refer you to a specialist. The specialist has just enough time to order tests.
> "I think gold is a bubble, but it's always been a bubble," hedged Shiller. "It has some industrial uses, but it basically it's like a fad that's lasted thousands of years."
In other words, he's changed the definition of the word "fad".
You can invest in equipment to mine Bitcoin, but if you hold the Bitcoin that you mine, then you are speculating.
To answer (or dodge) your original question: nobody knows for sure if its too late.
As of right now, the market is betting that it is better to own a Bitcoin than to hold $5,663 in cash. (The current price is $5,664.)
Coinbase is your best bet for getting started in the US.
In a market, you trade dollars for other valuable things.
In a stock market, you trade dollars for stocks.
Why is a stock valuable?
It represents a small piece of a company. If you bought up all the pieces of a company, you would own the entire company. But most people can't buy an entire company, so they buy small pieces of a company instead.
Why would you want to trade dollars for a small piece of a company?
A few reasons:
1. Because a company owns valuable assets, and if you own part of a company, then you own a part of those valuable assets.
2. Because a company earns money, and if you own part of a company, then you get some of that money. (Either directly as a dividend, or indirectly as more your shares gain in value.) Think about it: if you own part of a company, then for some small fraction of the day, every single person in that company is working for YOU. YOU get the fruits of their labors for that fraction of the day. If you do this with enough companies, then you can quit your job.
3. Because a company makes decisions, and if you own part of the company, then you get to vote on how those decisions are made.
4. Because dollars become less valuable over time, by about 2% per year, assuming that the economy is operating as planned. (Inflation.)
If they are not executing well, then business is business. Sooner or later someone will clone them, may as well be you.
Also, I firmly believe that every startup idea under the sun has already been done before. And either it failed due to poor execution or poor timing.
So the loophole is to find the prior art -- the thing that came before them, and failed -- and clone that instead.
So while a share that has accumulated a lot of voting power is valuable to me, you wouldn't necessarily pay any more for it, since the power doesn't transfer to you.
That's why longer term investments are preferable. It puts the focus on building sustainable value for its owners rather than balance sheet gymnastics.
Most of your argument here is in favor of liquidity, but that's not the issue in question.
You're also mistaking the role of stock exchanges, which are secondary markets. It's rare for companies to issue new shares to raise money. Not only does it send a bad signal and piss off existing shareholders, but its also one of the least efficient ways of getting capital. They'd prefer long-term debt.
In the last few decades, the US population stopped tolerating human casualties, so now every mission must have overwhelming force to minimize the chance of losing a single soldier. This has caused the cost of missions to skyrocket. (Forget about the opportunity cost of using that money to feed people or provide health care.)
Drones have "fixed" this problem by removing humans from the offensive entirely. As a side effect, there is no longer a "front" to the war. (The point of this article.)
You would think that the front is now everywhere. But that's not the case.
You'd think that the front is now targeted at specific strategic targets. That's kind of the case, but not really.
In actuality, the front is now determined by whatever can maximize media coverage to sway popular opinion. Planet Money did an interesting episode on this recently: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/episo...
> When NPR reporter Gregory Warner arrives in a town on the Ukrainian front lines, residents try to keep their distance. 'Don't come here,' they say. 'When journalists come, the bombs fall."
Regardless of his (or their) true thoughts on crypto, there is no situation in which it benefits him or JPMorgan to speak positively about crypto currencies.
As a finance company, they either want to "win" the game, or end the game. Slowing down adoption and/or encouraging government action help them toward both of these goals.
Voting rights are powerful. That's the point of the long-term exchange.
In existing exchanges, going long and short in equal amounts on the same stock simply cancel each other out.
But in a "long-term exchange", taking this same position (or lack thereof) gives me a valuable asset: voting power that grows over time.
A library works within the style and bounds of the base language.
A DSL intends to re-define the base language and invent new keywords and a unique control flow.