erdevs

> Bail-in will only be useful when the banks have built up enough bail-inable capital, and depending on what is the definition of bail-inable capital, most banks are not there yet

I'm glad to hear you say this. There is definitely a wide gap between the reality of available bail-in capital today and the promise of the theory if it were available.

> However all the draft regulations that are being prepared now point to relatively high requirements, in the region of 25-30% of the Risk Weighted Assets, which should be ample to absorb a very large loss.

Theoretically. But the problem is the "Risk Weighted Assets". How do you do the weighting? A great deal of work has gone into this (as you know), but RWA calcs existed pre-crisis, as did specific RWA tiers for securitized instruments. We failed to properly weight the risks before and nothing says we won't do so again. The Fed is still wrestling with "advanced approaches" to RWA and the last time I checked finalizing the requisite approach was on "indefinite delay".

Point being... we don't have any assurance here. And we don't want to repeat the mistakes of overconfidence in our prowess of risk-assessment that we made last time around.

> So if the crisis happens this week, it won't help, if it happens in 5 years or after it will certainly help a lot, and be a first line of defence before contemplating a bail out.

I agree with you fully here. We also need to address what happens in the more extreme cases (and we need to go further in preventing the likelihood of more extreme cases).

> On the separation of commercial and investment banks, I am not convinced it actually helps. Reproducing another of my comments on this article:

You were replying to me in that other comment as well. :)

As I mentioned there, I also think depository banks should be more regulated in a) the total risk they can take on, and b) what sorts of investments they can make. (So the total quantity of risk and the type of risk.)

The depository banks in the UK were not regulated enough, clearly. I don't see how combining poorly regulated depository banking risk with poorly regulated investment banking risk would possibly help. Imagine Lehman directly combined with RBS... it's an even bigger disaster.

Besides, my contention is not that retail banking = safe while investment banking = risky. Both are risky. It's that contagion is bad. Increased correlation is bad. Combining retail banks and investment banks is a bad idea both theoretically and as proven in practice.

We should contain risk. Let's allow some institutions (investment banks) to create complex derivatives, advanced securitizations, make markets, participate in diverse investments, trade fairly liberally and generally do what investment banks do. Let's put that type of risk in one bucket, and still regulate the total risk they can take on, the means by which they are unwound in crises, etc.

Let's have a separate bucket of risk for depository/retail banks, which is as separated as possible (in an interconnected and fast-moving economy and financial system) from that bucket of risk.

The only possible reason not to separate these two buckets of risk is if you think they diversify each other. But that's not right even theoretically and it definitely has not been the case in practice.

The problem is that liability still falls upon depositors in a bail-in. So, at the end of the day, it's still the unwitting public's money on the hook in the worst case scenarios, even if it's not a "bail out".

The expedited and more regulated insolvency proceedings are a big improvement and the bail-in provisions help within some lower boundary cases. But if "shit hits the fan", bail-in alone is not going to be enough.

The point is that Wall St won't really be "tamed" until we further minimize the possibility of shit and fan colliding. To do that, we need to further limit the risks investment banks can take on and greatly limit the risks that depository banks can take on.

If we don't do that, we're talking about how to cure the disease as opposed to how to prevent it. The fact is, we need more preventative measures and more cures. The bail-in is a good cure for some situations, but if the patient is too fargone it'd be too little, too late.

I fully concur with you that the sorts of investments that depository banks can make should be more highly regulated, as should their leverage ratios. I didn't include that on my top list for "taming Wall St" because we were discussing Wall St and this wasn't as much of an issue in the US/Wall St as in the UK. That said, I definitely agree this was an issue in the UK.

Another note here is that much of what brought down these UK banks was contagion, due to the bubble in commercial and residential real estate pricing and then to the spreading financial crisis and it's effects on chilling available financing and liquidity.

> In a way, universal banks tend to be more robust than a specialized bank, as it benefits from funding and revenues diversification (and cheer size to absorb losses)

This is not only an unproven claim, but a disproved claim. In the US, cross-breed banks resulted in greater contagion across the financial sector and put depositories at risk, increasing the need for bailout.

You could in theory get the best of both worlds by having a highly, highly regulated and constrained investment banking arm of a depository bank. But then how well would it compete with standalone investment banks? And would we really be able to ensure complete separation of risk between activities? Doubtful, in practice. This is a suboptimal set up.

Depositors in a bank do not deposit their money with the idea that it is going to be put at any significant risk. It's supposed to be effectively warehoused and insured. Taking complex and risky bets with deposits, or capital derived from or backed by a depository base of capital, makes no sense on first principles and the theory of combining operations for some benefit in diversification has been falsified in practice... the opposite happened, with higher degrees of correlation and contagion happening in reality.

> You can't send people to jail for making bad business decision

No, but we didn't pursue even a tiny fraction of the cases of negligence, let alone fraud. Also, reducing the discussion purely to jail time is a straw man. Civil penalties for individuals are perfectly justifiable, especially when you're well-compensated and when your decisions result in gross harm to the public.

You're overselling the bail-in provisions here. Frank-Dodd and the bail-in regulations it includes certainly introduced some much-needed improvements. But let's not pretend that the bail-in is either proven in practice nor a cure of any kind in truly dire situations.

The problem with the bail-in is that at the end of the day, if there isn't enough wholesale capital available, depositors are still on the hook. Indeed, we saw the only instance of the bail-in in practice (that I'm aware of at present) so far in Cyprus resulted in depositors having a portion of their savings converted to equity (in a nearly-insolvent entity).

At the end of the day, the risk still lies with the public if things get bad enough at a big bank. Through their deposits, through the FDIC, or through a bail-out, if the political winds blow that way.

The truly safest solution is to separate investment banking from depository banking again and to further limit both the size and the allowable exposure levels of investment banks.

I don't think the bail-in can yet be framed as a good thing. It's theoretically helpful in limited situations where enough wholesale capital is available (or can be made available) to solve a crisis of liquidity. Outside those boundaries, it induces greater risk on depositors. And in that situation, it may actually be good (in a perverse way) that the public doesn't know more about it, because if they did it'd likely increase the incentive/pressure on deposit bank runs.

Again, the solution here is to separate depository banking from investment banking. Or, put another way, to very tightly regulate the sorts of investments that depository banks can make. On top of that investment bank investments should be regulated more than they are today. And on top of all that, continuing with a rapid-insolvency process + bail-in would make sense for both depository and investment banks, should the need ever arise in either case (which likelihood would be greatly reduced through these further regulations). But the bail-in without these other measures carries risk and will be of only limited assistance.

Absolutely agree with what you are both saying, in that DC enabled Wall St by foolishly deregulating investment banking and banks.

Of course, that does not absolve Wall Street of blame for managing risk poorly, for fraudulent behavior, for negligence, and for short-term risk taking over long-term growth.

Then again, Hollywood is now increasingly dependent on China, increasingly tailors film to the Chinese market and cultural demands, and is taking more and more financing from China:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/21/words-...

http://fortune.com/hollywood-film-financing/

https://next.ft.com/content/2cb93908-2c65-11e6-bf8d-26294ad5...

I don't see how Wall St will be "tamed" until the following criteria are met:

* No individual bank is "too big to fail". Today we have several banks which are all too big to actually let fail, which means we're likely to need to do structured bailouts for them again.

* Commercial banking and investment banking are split again. As it stands with commercial banks and investment banks housed in the same entity and sharing risks, there is the constant risk of contagion from bad IB bets jeapordizing commercial banking assets and operations. This not only creates further interdependence and correlation between IB activity and commercial banking, but also adds more pressure for bailouts of big, cross-breed banks.

* There are legitimate personal fines and even criminal penalties and a demonstrated will of enforcement for individuals who participate in fraudulent or negligent investments. We pursued (to a lighter degree than we probably should have) the banks themselves for these activities and received judgments and settlements, yet we didn't pursue many personal penalties nor criminal cases related to any of them. See: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wall... We need to reconcile this and even strengthen the laws governing bank investing, so as to disincent poor investment behavior at the most personal level, rather than simply being a financial calculus for the company itself, with no expected loss or penalty for the persons involved in the decision making.

True. Though what would happen if you launched your lunar vehicle from a platform on international waters?

Loophole? Or do we now get to mix in Maritime Law as well as the Outer Space Treaty, which is an even cooler jail story in the making...

Thanks for explaining / clarifying.

> I don't view this as a victory of Didi either, they simply defended their home turf.

I think this is where we disagree. It was definitely a victory for Didi. They beat Uber in China, which is the market they care most about.

Moreover, they have aligned themselves strategically. They now have a stake of Uber as well (don't forget Didi also invested $1B in Uber and as a result achieved information rights on Uber). They have partnerships with Grab in SE Asia and Ola in Inida. Lyft in the US. They continue to encircle Uber...

Whereas a year ago, an Uber investor could've reasonable thought Uber was on a path to domination worldwide... today it's clear that their potential is greatly diminished from those lofty possibilities. They are removed from China outright. They are being confronted by an opponent that has already beat them in SE Asia and perhaps in India. Who knows what is next in Europe and the US.

Didi has been absolutely brilliant here, and they deserve full credit for it.

Related article: https://www.techinasia.com/grabs-2015-financial-numbers-reve...

Another aspect that I haven't seen discussed a whole lot yet in relation to Didi's purchase of Uber:

Didi's $1B investment in Uber gives Didi an economic interest in Uber, but perhaps most importantly it probably gives Didi investor information rights. This is a big deal when it comes to navigating the waters to compete with Uber directly or indirectly in markets outside China. Uber may also have information rights on Didi, but those may only be shareholder (eg common) rights vs investor information rights since Uber China's acquisition was a merger rather than a cash investment.

In any case, I don't think people are giving Didi enough credit for how savvy and strategic they were here. Uber seems to have been outplayed on every level by Didi when they faced off. It will be very interesting to see what happens over the coming years.

So weird to see people trying to put a positive spin on this for Uber.

Uber lost in China, flat out.

> Negate Lyft's efforts to run around Uber in China by empowering Didi to crush them

What? Didi and Lyft struck a deep partnership. Lyft doesn't have Chinese operations. The pressure induced on Uber by Didi and Lyft working together is part of what got Uber to admit they were losing the fight and didn't have a reasonable path to victory.

As for framing their 20% stake (actually, it is 18%) as a win, consider this:

Uber burned over $2B in cash in China. If simply owning a % of Didi was an acceptable "win" state for Uber, they would've been much smarter to simply invest that $2B into Didi. Just a year ago, Didi was valuated at only $13B... even then, the $2B would've resulted in a ~13% ownership stake. Last year, they were valuated under $10B. Tencent got a ~20% stake in Didi for just $15M only 3 years ago.

In fact, Uber could've played a much stronger hand and ended up with far more than 18% of Didi if they'd offered to invest $1-2B and agreed not to enter China in the first place. Or, they could've made a credible threat by growing rapidly (as they did) for a year, and then offering a merger + an investment from a position of strength. Instead, they played a suboptimal strategy. They continued to operate in China and their growth slowed, meanwhile they burned even more money, their investors started making noise about backing out, and they gave Didi time to strike huge strategic partnerships (Kuaidi and Lyft) and raise a bunch more money, all of which strengthened their position relative to Uber even further.

The time to strike a combination with Didi was 1-2 years ago. They could've got a much, much better deal while still spending only the same total amount of money.

This was a loss for Uber, and it absolutely wasn't their intended outcome, nor their best outcome.

Uber has absolutely dominated in other markets. So, it's not like they're dummies or poor operators. They are amazing in terms of market domination. But let's not put a sugar coating on this. Call a win a win and a loss a loss.

Ugh, this is a poorly written piece. Points are muddled, poor segues, poor references/unbacked claims, and a meandering story. Not what I'd hope for from Levy.

From the article:

> "..in fact, Uber felt it was treated fairly by a government interested in transportation innovation"

Anyone have a source on this?

Also, this seems to me like something you'd say even without believing it, if you were afraid of disgruntling the government (either for Uber's operations, or for your prospective future endeavors).

> > > As late as this past June, Uber was predicting it would pass its rival within a year.

> This is simply not true.

Yes it is true. Kalanick's investor updates from 24-12 months ago were all gung ho on China and how Uber was seeing as much or more success there as any Western country ever had. Their explicit goal was to outcompete Didi and become the #1 on-demand service in China (on-demand generally... not just for transportation). Their timeline for winning majority market share was 12-24 months out, and that is how they justified the extremely, extremely aggressive cash burn in the market. (Nobody burns $1B+/yr in cash gunning to grow slowly into second place.) Believe me when I say that several billion dollars of raised capital and $10B+ of Uber's imputed valuation was attributed to their potential in China, their growth there, and their plan to dominate in the next 12-24 months.

What evidence have you that this is "simply not true." Some of these statements to investors have become public knowledge, which you'll see with a simple google search.

Just one of many articles and quotes from this timeframe outlining Uber's explicit goal of becoming dominant in marketshare in China within a year: http://www.digitaltrends.com/business/uber-beat-didi/ Note as well how cocky and aggressive Uber was here in their marketing, public statements, etc.

> Also I don't view the merge of Uber China and Didi as a failure on Uber's side.

It was absolutely a failure. Uber's goal was to beat Didi and dominate in China, as is their goal in every single market they enter. Did they succeed or fail in that goal?

Uber did a good job salvaging value here in having its Chinese operation acquired by Didi. But make no mistake, it was a failure and this falls far short of both their intentions and their promises to investors.

Also, this was forced on Uber by investors. People lost faith that Uber could win in China, and rightfully so. The cash burn was staggering and there was no end in sight and no clear path to actual victory, despite the previously lofty updates and promises.

> It's more or less a peace treaty or truce

No. A peace treaty or truce means each side remains independent but they agree to stop warring with each other. This is an outright purchase. Uber lost the war and it's best option was to salvage value in Uber China by merging into a minority, small position (only 18%) within Didi's business.

> Uber-like service is simply too cheap in China for a long time, (I Uber to work for less than $2 for example), and both side cannot hold it any more. It's as simple as that.

Yes. It was a war of attrition. And Uber lost the war. As simple as that. That's why it makes no sense that you're framing this as somehow just a "peace treaty".

> Before the Didi-Uber merge, there's a similar merge of Didi and it's major competitor Kuaidi..

Yes, this was a brilliant move on Didi's (and Kuaidi's) part. On top of this, Didi struck a partnership with Lyft. In terms of military strategy, Didi was encircling Uber on all sides. Instead of having to fight a war on two fronts with Kuaidi and Uber, they used Kuaidi and Lyft as springboards.

This was absolutely brilliant and bold strategy and it's an approach few start-ups could pull off or would even attempt trying. M&A and mergers are extremely complex for start-ups to tackle and this was brilliant strategy.

2 years ago, Uber was playing the role of the big dog and pressuring to buy Didi. After Didi's great growth and very effective strategy over the past two years, the roles were totally reversed and Didi bought Uber's China operations for what was ultimately a pittance. 18%, which will be further diluted over time.

> The story between Google and Baidu is a whole different one. First search engine as a gateway to informations is viewed as vital by the Chinese government and government really worked on Baidu's side.

I think the governemnt helped Didi quite a bit too. As did Tencent.

It seems to me that China outplayed the West here by a wide margin.

For some reason, the West has let China get away with extremely protectionist trade policies the likes of which no one else in the world would dare even attempt. I think this was a combination of fear that isolating China vs creating a high degree of economic interdependence could lead to war down the line, and a lack of control over Western companies who sought to break into China.

The situation today is deeply concerning. I think Western nations need to take dramatic action to curb / disincent China's protectionist policies and let their market open up to the rest of the world. If they won't truly do so, then the West needs to respond in kind.

Wow, really sorry to hear about the struggle. And I hear you on this process undermining confidence.

I think going for a startup is a great idea, and it's awesome you have the family support to do this. Any ideas on what the startup will be yet? Lots of friendly people here who are willing to help in whatever ways they can!

If you think winter might be coming and want to prepare financially, the #1 most important piece of advice is this:

Lower your expenses.

Nothing gets you into trouble more than having a high expense load. Get as close as you can to spending nothing.

The next most important piece of advice is to build up cash. 6 months of your monthly burn is cutting it way too close. You should save until you have at least two years. What's more, you should save until you can actually invest some money.

These two bits of advice go hand in hand. The lower your expenses, the easier is to save 24+ months of runway up. And the reverse is true too.

Beyond that, you can do a couple other things to prepare yourself. You could join a larger, profitable company with no history of major layoffs. (Eg Google, Facebook, many others.) Or, you could take the opportunity now to start your own company, and maybe think about what sorts of businesses could benefit from an economic downturn when you do so. Focus on getting it profitable, rather than focusing on rapacious growth. Obviously, these moves (getting a job at a stable company or stating a company and getting it profitable) are more out of your control and harder to pull off. Which is why cutting expenses and saving as much as possible are the most critical endeavors.

Is there any response from the women in the video herself? How did she interpret it?

I watched the stream. Definitely not a sensitive remark and frankly the guy came off as a jackass across the board, from brushing off the research group's description of their work just before the raffle, to this insensitive-or-worse joke, to holding onto the second woman to win's hand for a creepy-long time.

Cool that both raffle winners were women and it was nice to see quite a few women in the audience!

This is pretty cool. :-)

Building games on something like Alexa could be really fun. I can see adventure games in particular working well.

Are there any mobile adventure games or choose your own adventure stories that use your voice for commands? That could be fun too.

Very cool of Amazon to promote this employee project. Hope some good Alexa adventures get created!

Anybody at other bitcoin exchanges have info/ideas to share on what may have happened here and how other exchanges can avoid similar pitfalls? It's intriguing that withdrawal limits were bypassed.

I wonder what sort of monitoring+alerting their team had set up and how long this attack ran for.

You seem to have conveniently removed from the quote you cited the following sentence in the very same paragraph, which says, "They have heavy governmental investment in infrastructure (eg internet, cell networks) and they heavily regulate industries so as not to stymie utilities such as the internet."

Doesn't that address the points you made about the benefit of government intervention and infrastructure build up?

> B) Their populations are closer. This is a big one for transport, in particular

You realize that S.Korea is ~3-4x as dense as China, that China is only about as dense as the UK, and the distance between major cities in China is comparable to distances between major cities in the US, right?

I could agree with some of the latter part of your post. Could have done without the glib rudeness at the beginning. I don't mean anything "bigoted" whatsoever and I'm curious what exactly came across that way.

I meant that greater intelligence and drive mean higher likelihood to invent or incorporate technology, higher likelihood to succeed driving its adoption as a business, etc.

To try to make this more concrete and tractable. Imagine this oversimplified scenario:

Country A's population is 100 people and their "culture" values education, intelligence and hard work. Country A's average IQ is 107 and the two most desired professions in the country are to be an engineer or a businessperson.

Country B's population is 100 people and their culture looks down on "nerds" and favors "coolness" and hanging out. Country B's average IQ is 100 and the top desired professions in the country are being a sports star or a rock star.

Obviously I'm drawing at extremes here, but you see where I'm going... which country produces more citizens that contribute to technology? Country A is probably gonna produce more cool tech over time than country B, even with equal-sized populations, due to a combination of cultural values / social incentives and population intelligence.

I liked several recommendations from this article, but it seems to be missing some important practices that influence success/failure in many product dev efforts as well. What I especially liked from the article:

* The Product Lead seems a good reco, and is similar to a Product Owner in other parlance.

* Engendering buy-in by letting everyone suggest ideas and feel heard is definitely a great technique for org management in product dev. This works doubly well if everyone has confidence that product decisions are made in a sensible, clear, fair/unbiased way after everyone's ideas are out there.

* Clear measurements of success are hugely helpful as well.

Things that seem to be missing:

* What is the purpose of the product? What is the true north / guiding light problem you're solving? This sounds squishy and it's easy to say something ambiguous and high level "we're gonna create a social video app!" or "be instagram for video". But this should sound more like a problem to be solved. A "why" or more than a "what". Ie "We haven't found a social video product we love yet, and we also think it's a problem that social media is always persistent and not private or safe enough." Or "We love our phone cameras and we want to make and share goofy videos. But we don't wanna post such random stuff to FB, Twitter, or Instagram where it'd clog the feed and live forever." Or "we wanna be able to make and share goofy videos without having them haunt us forever." Or even "there is no perfect dick pic app yet, and just texting lots of dick pics really sucks." These are shitty, off-the-cuff examples, but going through the process of clearly articulating this can really help you congeal focus and serve as a guiding light as you develop. You can expect to change this guiding light over time if you learn that, in actuality, not many users see the same problem or feel the same pain you do... but that is also very good to clearly know as early as possible! Stating your problem / what you're chasing down in clear terms helps you figure out if there is anything there worth solving sooner than later, and that is vital in the early days of product dev. I wonder that the beginning of this article talks about tactics like product dev cycle length vs this higher level purpose.

* Where does analysis of the market/strategic landscape fit in? This is another crucial element and it can help inform your "plan of attack" in terms of what to prioritize day to day or week to week. I think that SocialCam may have done better if they'd taken this more strategic approach to the landscape on mobile especially. For example, they may not have chosen to rely so heavily on Facebook early on. Or, they may have decided to explicitly target younger users, realizing that FB, Twitter and even Instagram left a lot of room there.

* Clear measures of success are discussed, but how do those relate to core product KPIs? In particular, it is vital to measure retention cleanly and effectively, and to measure engagement, and viral/k-factor/wom installs as best as possible. Zealously improving these metrics every week is critical in the early days, and improving these metrics should be a primary activity in feature experimentation (see below). Moreover, you should be looking for step-change improvements early on, not little incremental gains, and you should keep hunting until you find step-changes. You're waiting for some feature or use flow in your product to catch wind and drive a cycle of engagement, more frequent revisiting and word-of-mouth/viral recommendation. Gotta measure these and these are really the only "measures of success" early on.

* Where are structured feature experiments? Especially when you're hunting product/market fit (as SocialCam was early on), it's essential that you have theses on what will "catch fire" with users and prepare the best experiments to test them that you can. Here again, SocialCam may have more quickly iterated toward something like Snapchat if they'd had theses or testable ideas. In early product dev cycles while hunting true product/market fit and strong engagement+retention+virality, fully ~80% of product dev resources can be allocated to feature experiments.. and pretty much all features should be treated as experimental until fit is found. For a product like this (a game or a social product) the constant, daily refrain should be "is it fun yet?" "Is it really, truly fun yet?" "Do you just enjoy screwing around with it?" "Do you feel compelled to use it when you go too long without it?" For a product like this, keep testing out functionality until it's fun. Make that the singular, maniacal focus early on until it is fun and you've caught fire with at least some demo/psychographic.

* Where is a frequent customer feedback process? The article mentions "trying" to do monthly in-person user feedback sessions... but for free consumer-facing apps, especially in their very early/conceptual phases, it's much better to pull-in users every few days, if not every single day. That user feedback is your lifeblood early on and a feature isn't worth fully testing and polishing if it doesn't seem like it's gonna catch fire or move you closer to fun.

* For an early product dev set up, I think continuous int and daily or semi-daily functional builds you can test with customers/users are important (partially so that you can get rapid, regular feedback from users). The article says they iterated "extremely quickly", which I'm sure is true relative to their previous process... but a 2-week fixed cycle in the early days of a product's (especially a consumer-facing product vs a b2b product) dev and exploration of p/m fit is very, very slow. That's only 26 turns at bat per year, which is too slow when it's early on. More importantly/starkly, it's only 2 times at bat per month early on... that really makes it hard to truly rapidly iterate.

* Curious whether the author ever tried dual-track development. There are the rapid-fire, ideally daily builds and experiments going on on one track (the discovery track, in this case of early consumer-facing product dev) and there can be a longer-cycle track for things like underlying infrastructure improvement, UX improvements, bug fixes, and other incremental improvements. (This is different than the way dual-track pd would be applied in other contexts... this is a way to dual-track in the pupative stage of a consumer-facing social app.) Splitting effort in this way can be extremely helpful, especially after you have some initial traction.

In any case, this is a useful article and it contains some good advice. I think it could be supplemented with some addition practices that help a lot in this sort of context as well.

I wonder if the reason roll-to-roll processes haven't caught on is that there is so much capital investment in IC/wafer processes at scale that the unit economics just don't add up (until/unless very large capital investments are made to scale up and refine margins on roll-printed circuits).

If this is the case, are there areas to attack the market? Any smaller markets which don't attract the attention of major electronics fab and might be delved to help bootstrap roll-printing? Any old/displaced technology areas that no longer have the advantage of large fabs/infrastructure investments where roll-to-roll processes could come online to replace them at competitive prices?

Any idea what it'd take, in terms of unsolved R&D and in terms of capital investment, to create a roll-to-roll process capability of printing some circuit that would be cost-competitive in some area like solar cells or maybe simple ICs?

"...recently fabricated a flexible transistor that operates at 110 gigahertz"

I know there have been other transistors from R&D projects which operate at 690+ ghz as well. But does anyone with much better EE and chip manufacturing experience than me know how this 110 ghz transistor might translate to actual chip/IC speeds, if this thing were scaled up and produced?

Traveling to major cities in China (and Korea) is like a preview of where the US will be in ~5 years from a technology-society integration perspective. Easy payments on your phone, electronic communications for official notices/correspondences, mobile-electronic interactions with government, many/most people playing games and socializing about them, non-personal-car transportation (taxis/didis, buses, bikes), hyper-dense cities as populations urbanize.

It makes sense that China (and Korea) have leaped ahead. They have relatively high average IQ populations. They have cultures that celebrate education, intelligence, and hard work (not sports and broism). They have heavy governmental investment in infrastructure (eg internet, cell networks) and they heavily regulate industries so as not to stymie utilities such as the internet.

Hopefully the US and Europe can create a cultural shift (particularly the US on this front) and can see more government investment in infrastructure for technology and ease of access. If so, the US/Europe will maintain/grow their competitive edges vs China at least, as they have better property rights, fairer courts, more developed financial markets, more meritocracy of opportunity, etc. Korea has the best of all worlds in many ways, but not a large enough population or enough natural resources to be a contender for one of the top few economic powers in the world.

Isn't pretty much the same thing happening in San Francisco, too? Alongside all the other drivers of increased home prices there. I think SF has shot up the ranks to become one of the most expensive cities in the world now, right?

Ugh. This type of behavior should be banned everywhere. It's incredibly invasive and it serves no function in evaluating candidate fit. It serves merely to increase already high information asymmetry against you and reduce your prospective offer from where it might have otherwise landed.

Gotcha. So, if an app is monetizing (wholly or partially) through ads, they can still offer rewards for viewing those ads and turning on ad-tracking. Cool and thanks for dropping the knowledge. Think there's any chance that the policy regarding incentivizing turning on ad tracking will change alongside iOS 10?

That's a good point of concern, for sure.

Great links and good perspective here. I agree completely that it is unfair that big companies can perform these maneuvers while small-businesses (and even profitable start-ups) would struggle to. There are so many scale-asymmetries in business, but this is a particular egregious modern example.