82 karma · joined October 15, 2019
I believe a lot have been said here and it reveals how the so called economist at DB thinks.
On my side,I would just like to add a reference to F.Bastia
And its well known sophism:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/frederic-bastiat.asp#:~....
Henri Kissinger's book, World order, is a great example of this approach.
Though I do like read HN comments first and then the article
In third world countries, women reprensent 50% of the students in engineering classes ( for reasons that are easily understandable).
Actually, the bias observed applyies in countries where freedom of choice is given to everyone.
Any thoughts?
Although I understand your view,Financial sector and banks in particular is a very regulated sector which means that significant number of people working there have their job almost entirely related to making sure the company comply with the rules from the different jurisdictions. From your perspective, they do add no value to the company ( actually there are cost center) but are crucial to ensure company can operate legally. To add an additional layer of complexity, new rules from different countries, authorities, committees are updated/ amended quite regularly ( last one is the LIBOR demise which will have a huge impact on the market where no clear rules,have acknowledged nor agreed). So even you would try to quantify those costs ( legal issue with new rules implementation which lead to update the system or create one from scratch while making sure this will comply with internal task,etc...), it is quite difficult to assess what is the optimal allocation the company needs to allocate. As an illustrative example, it took 2 years to validate some components of the google cloud features (some are still pending) because of all the intetnal rules set out.
More globally, yes there are people adding no value to the company but the can be hardly spot on from top management view.
Really looking forward to seeing this once the average guy ( here I think to the married man with two kids) will be fully benefit from it.
In addition, I would be very interested to see how big countries will react. I know Us citizens pay their home tax regardless where they live but this could be a huge issue for them in the long term.
Fed coin would be in fact very useful for the government itself... not sure if you have some understanding of the latest 2008 crisis and how the fed address the issue but there are many shortcomings in the solution proposed that would be easily addressed with a government backed digital currency. The main one would be , in my opinion, to be able to manage more efficiently money lent to banks. At that time the banks received a lot of money from the fed with the hope that the this money would be use to increase the loans ( and so the economy). However, banks were not very keen to follow that inventive and did not lend as expected. The point in having a digital currency would have let the fed to reward (with a lowest rates) banks playing the game. This just one example I have on the top of my mind right now, but I'm sure we can find others advantages.
Airbnb is just taking advantage of a more ugly situation ( sure you have witnessed displeasant adventures encountered in buying house, going to holiday or move out from a flat). However I wouldn't be surprised if they have speeded up the process you blamed.
Please note that I do not work nor ever used Airbnb before.