Is it an exchange or more like a lead gen company? I thought coinbase's business model was to advertise heavily to get newbie crypto investors on their platform and then to charge wildly inflated commissions compared to other exchanges. Kind of like a Rocket mortgage for crypto. Unfortunately in that business model gross revenue directly tracks the price of bitcoin.
Credit checks are actually somewhat costly for a small landlord. We had a rental house, and you can't just order a one off credit check. We needed to join a rental housing organization (or contract with a rental agency) to get access to credit checks. That being said, there is room in the market for a tenant friendly app that caches your credit check if you are applying to multiple apartments -- no need to run your credit multiple times within a few weeks.
Economists like to say "the cure for high prices is high prices." High prices should reduce demand and also increase supply. I don't see how this necessarily leads to a recession (a contraction in the economy) which is usually caused by fewer people working. We have record low unemployment. A lot of people are just parroting political talking points at this point about the inevitability of a recession, there is no indication yet of one AFAIK.
I think likely the number of people living in existing housing stock is going down. I read somewhere that more than half of the rent controlled 3 bedroom apartments in San Francisco are occupied by a single older person (why leave your $1500 per month 3 bedroom apartment?). I've noticed that the single family home neighborhoods I've lived in have gone from 1-2 parents and 2-3 kids in the house to older couples or single people living in the house. And it's not just people that stay due to prop 13 -- when houses go on the market they often get bought by single people.
My daughter did just did college applications and her school used a service call SCOIR. For all of the colleges she was interested, they had a two dimensional (test score, GPA) graph that showed all recent applicants from her school and whether or not the applicant got accepted into that particular college. You could then see exactly what your chances are. For schools with too few applicants they did not generate this graph.
After looking at her college choices it seemed like less of crapshoot. The patterns were pretty consistent.
I assume you are being facetious. Tahoe has always been primarily second home owners. 20 years ago you rented through an agency, craigslist, or word of mouth if you were doing short term rentals. AirBnb just means it is easier to fill them so they rent more frequently which makes renting long term financially unattractive.
My teenagers use Snapchat regularly, and Snap Maps seem to be the "killer app" for them. It allows them to see which of their friends are around when they travel or are out and about on the weekends.
The problem with many sites (and LinkedIn in particular) is that they whitelist a bunch of specific websites, presumably based on the business interests, but disallow everyone else in their robots.txt. You should either allow all scrapers that respect certain load requirements or allow none. Anything that Google is allowed to see and include in their search results should be fair game.
Here's the end of LinkedIn's robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
# Notice: If you would like to crawl LinkedIn,
# please email whitelist-crawl@linkedin.com to apply
# for white listing.
I'm not an expert, but there are several types of unions. The biggest distinction is public sector vs. private sector. Public sector unions have their own issues, but this would be a private sector union. Within private sector unions there are "factory" type unions and skilled worker unions (electricians, plumbers, etc.). In the case where you have a single "factory" in a town, the workers need to bargain together in order for wages/working conditions to not have a race to the bottom. Workers can't take their specific skills learned at the factory across the street and get similar pay since there is only one place to work. For skilled worker unions, the unions allow workers to float through various companies that have work while maintaining their pensions and wages (determined across the entire union hall based on seniority). Companies of course hate being forced to hire more senior workers at higher pay level when their productivity is not that much higher (or even less).
A lot of the "bad" reputation with private sector unions likely originated with the corruption associated with the pension funds investing in shady deals. And we all have horror stories about bad teachers protected by the union or "lazy" workers.
This data, unfortunately, is missing an important confounding variable besides male/female. In the US lifespan his highly correlated with income, and the trend is getting worse.
"The gap in life expectancy between the richest 1% and poorest 1% of individuals was 14.6 years (95% CI, 14.4 to 14.8 years) for men and 10.1 years (95% CI, 9.9 to 10.3 years) for women. Second, inequality in life expectancy increased over time. Between 2001 and 2014, life expectancy increased by 2.34 years for men and 2.91 years for women in the top 5% of the income distribution, but increased by only 0.32 years for men and 0.04 years for women in the bottom 5% (P < .001 for the difference for both sexes)." [1]
The initial waves were a crisis in that we were suffering from resource exhaustion in the medical system. People were dying simply because we ran out of resources to treat them, both for Covid and for non Covid medical issues. With vaccination and improved Covid care we can now handle the patient load although at great personal sacrifice to medical professionals.
I saw a 2200 square foot house in Mill Valley, CA on Twitter this morning. It was listed for about $3M and went for $1.6M over asking. Over $2000 per square foot. On the other hand, the pictures seem to suggest it has the perfect Pottery Barn look that buyers want. One thing that the Fed report fails to consider is the cost, time and hassle of renovations. To get to that Pottery Barn look on a non renovated house would require at least a year and be very, very expensive (probably $1000 square foot just for renovations). Also, it doesn't seem like anyone in the most desirable neighborhoods is selling, as it is basically insane to sell when the houses are appreciating at 20% like clockwork. So you have a desperate buyer that has to pay $1.6M on the single perfect house to come on the market this year.
Agree -- here in California where we only have one relevant political party the California Energy commission has been able to impose energy efficiency requirements for appliances and buildings that have had a huge positive impact on our energy usage per capita. We've also had EPICS like the tax credit and ability to drive in the carpool lane for hybrids and later electric cars.
At a US national level we have partisan trench warfare exacerbated by a Senate dominated by small states and supermajoritarian voting rules. It's not entirely untrue that the the continued existence of the US Senate is incompatible with a future habitable planet.
There are microeconomic concepts I learned in college that make decarbonization nearly impossible. First the FREE RIDER principle. Since CO2 (and methane) affects temperature globally, every nation (and individual) is incentivized to free ride off the decarbonization expenses of others. Second, the PRISONER'S DILEMMA. Most political systems have two main parties competing for power. Although both parties broadly agree that climate change is bad, policies that kick the can down the road are electorally advantageous (less taxes now always beats a better future). Thus the NASH EQUILIBRIUM is for political parties to always promise to undo any costly changes the other party is proposing.
It's important in relating these horror stories to include whether or not he was applying to Computer Science and/or Engineering. The growth in demand for CS has outpaced any schools ability to handle the students. My daughter's college counselor had different sets of target schools depending on the major (in her case she was thinking about biomedical engineering, one of the most sought after).
The fundamental problem is that in order for the company to accept legal responsibility the self driving system must follow all traffic laws, and there is no way consumers will accept a car that won't go faster than the speed limit in no traffic situation.
Are your subcontractors fully insured? Do they fully pay workers compensation? Are their employees legally authorized to work in the US? There is a quite substantial price premium in the market now for contractors that follow the law, and government projects are forced to follow the law.
Canada promised to do that and the proposal was still wildly unpopular and abandoned. If you've build your life around no carbon tax (e.g. you live far from work and need to drive) you will personally suffer from such a change and will vocally lobby against the change. We end up with things like the Yellow Vest movement in France or the political instability that happens when any government tries to reduce fuel subsidies. It seems that voters are more sensitive to the price of gas than any other issue and any political party that causes the price of gas to go up gets voted out of office. Paul Krugman wrote a post recently showing that US consumers' inflation expectation exactly tracks the price of gas. I've concluded that any consumer impacting carbon tax cannot work in a democratic system. We need subsidies (both explicit and hidden) to reduce our carbon emissions.
I have an adjustable rate mortgage based on LIBOR and the lender still has not said what they plan to do. The presumed replacement rate (SOFR) seems to be pegged near 0% which would be good.
The article is missing a discussion of whether the new deals are becoming more founder and employee friendly (no liquidation preferences, less dilution, etc.) If these jaw dropping deals have poor terms it becomes less and less attractive for new employees to join these companies.
> In addition many are not welcoming to women at all
Economists are now finding that as more women move into a profession, the pay goes down. Similarly, when computer programming moved from a female dominated profession (early days) to male dominated (now) the pay went up. Medical fields that have higher proportions of women have lower pay. Along these lines, as college skews more female (college grads are like 60/40 female/male now) the "college grad" professions are having a declining wage premium compared to non college grad jobs.
The deal that really reeked of buying the competition was WhatsApp, but since WhatsApp has very small market share in the US compared to iMessage I don't see how that can be an antitrust violation in the US. In the rest of the world it could be.
The curated search results business model doesn't work. Google gives "aggregators" and other search engines the death sentence for organic search traffic from economically meaningful queries, so you'd get no free traffic. This is one of the major antitrust complaints against Google in the EU. Since you get no organic search traffic, you need to build a brand using advertising, and once you start down that road you need to monetize the first click which compromises the quality of your site.
If you need it now to do your job, one strategy companies use is to escalate the request to the common point of reporting (even if it is the CEO). You and the person you are in conflict with (the other manager) need to write an escalation doc describing the conflict. It won't get to the CEO as there will be increasing levels of embarrassment up the report chain. If it does hit the point of common reporting and she says end of Q1 2022 you've got to accept her decision
Oakland still has crime issues but it has really rejuvenated in the last 10 years. The census data reflects this (we grew by 10%) but it is also getting much better in terms of amenities, restaurants and nightlife. For the first time I can remember I see younger people (mid 20s) out and about in the evening rather than trekking over the bridge to SF. It seems to have become the epicenter of dining innovation in the East Bay (taking that title from Berkeley) and is some ways competitive with SF now in terms of new restaurants. The San Francisco Chronicle reviews a large number of Oakland restaurants now (which I suspect is mostly due to the fact that their new restaurant critic likely can't afford to live in SF and lives in Oakland). Many neighborhood corridors are finally "happening" after previous false starts (the Laurel District being the most recent example).
> - Immigration won't be the solution for western nations that it used to be. And poor nations with insane birth rates don't have them any more. Already eastern europe, india, phillipines etc are becoming rich enough that much much less people want to emmigrate. Africas next. Cheap labour for corporations will basically dry up.
I'm not sure that high birth rates are driving emigration so much as corrupt and ineffective governments, and I'm not sure that corrupt and ineffective governments are consequences of high birth rates. And by corruption I'm not refer to the US variety (political donations) but instead low level bribery that is required as part of every day life.
Facebook doesn't really decide what you see, but instead optimizes what you see to maximize your engagement. If you never engage with political content or misinformation, you generally won't see it. Once you start engaging, it will drown out everything. What they could provide is a "no politics" option, but I wonder if anyone would utilize it. There was an old saying in the personalized recommendations world along the lines of "if you want to figure out what someone wants to read, don't ask them because they will lie." For instance, if you ask people what kinds of news they want they will invariably check "science" but in fact they will mostly read celebrity gossip and sports.
The San Francisco Chronicle has done some analyses of the Bay Area exodus, and the majority are not moving to Texas but instead to places like San Joaquin and Madera county (counties that border the Bay Area). People want the bigger house, but they also want to be able to visit their friends and family.