381 karma · joined December 19, 2014
Does the new capacity make a bitcoin more valuable or less valuable?
Intuitively seems like more valuable, but the average cost in energy to mine the marginal block has gone down (otherwise the new miner wouldn't be mining) and that's often though of as the floor on BTC value.
Seems like having a stronger network is a net plus, and since they're probably not near the 50%+1 threshold it probably is in fact a stronger network. Although maybe they will get close if marginal miners are forced to turn off if the price of XBT drops and BitFury is enough more efficient.
Although BitFury is probably not a bad actor, technically a 50%+1 attack is not obviously illegal (IANAL), although a government might step in ironically enough. It seems to me these types of more centralized setups do introduce some tail risk to the system.
IANAL, so please someone who is actually informed feel free to correct me. A lot of what I've seen written is completely un-nuanced and probably wrong.
My understanding is that Delaware has strong corporate law with well defined protections for corporations and lots of case law to back it up from their Chancery Court. The huge history of case law is really what makes the big deal from what I've read because it makes contracts enforced there (which all shareholder contracts would be) much more predictable in terms of what's allowed.
Sometimes the generating revenue part itself is expensive to build, if you can't even get tons of people to use your product for free you're going to have trouble getting there (but that's a lot more for advertising-based revenue).
I think a lot fewer companies have no revenue stream that you're suggesting. Sometimes very early companies haven't figured out revenue, but they also haven't figured out product. Sometimes they're closely tied together, sometimes they're not.
So you could claim a company is spending too much on user acquisition, but another way of framing it is financing their fixed costs and working their ass off to get to a point where they can sustain their fixed costs from the variable costs of their user base.
2) Openings are not as dead as you think. There are certain lines that are more well studied than others, but until you're 2650 FIDE (don't worry, 99.99% of players won't get there) you can deviate and have just fine results.
3) I think your thoughts about the opening are probably mis-informed. Look at the games from the recent london chess classic here:
https://chess24.com/en/watch/live-tournaments/london-chess-c...
In round 3 Vachier-Lagrave already spent 9 minutes as white on a single move at move 9 in a open sicilian (maybe not as few choices as you're suggesting).
Again in round 4 he spent 5 minutes on move 9 in a sicilian and then 12 minutes on move 11.
B) I have several dell charging cables and they're just slightly more substantial and don't feel bulky at all. In fact if anything the cord from the charger to the wall is slight overkill.
C) There is a solution well inbetween that steelseries uses for their mice:
http://www.hardwareheaven.com/reviewimages/steelseries-kinzu...
I'm not sure exactly what it's made from, but cat has not even gotten close to damaging it yet. Not saying it needs to be on every cable, but for a $75 cable it would be nice.
[1] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Obama-opposes-proposed-ba...
It's interestingly how strong your opinion is when it could be easily improved upon by just reading wikipedia[3]. Here are states that actually passed SSM by popular referendum:
* Maine [1]
* Washington State[2]
* Maryland
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_Question_1,_2012 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Referendum_74 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryland_Question_6 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_Unite...
I also disagree with how the Brendon Eich was handled and it's important to have a diversity of views within an organization. Ultimately I think if Eich had been a stronger leader he would have been able to move past the incident, but there were already issues of confidence in his leadership BEFORE the incident happened.[5]
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Mozilla
"On March 24, 2014, Eich was promoted to CEO of Mozilla Corporation. Gary Kovacs, John Lilly and Ellen Siminoff resigned from the Mozilla board after the appointment, some expressing disagreements with Eich's strategy and their desire for a CEO with experience in the mobile industry."
* Canceling the return flight if you miss your fight out, even if it was an un-intentional miss.
* (not all airlines) Charging more that the cost of a round-trip ticket for a one-way ticket.
* Making it intentionally difficult to report a problem: Hiding customer service phone numbers, having 1500 character limits on the web forms and no e-mail customer service (to reply to a reply you have to go back to the web form).
* Having lines to check bags that take over an hour to sort through (I avoid checking bags, but not everybody I travel with does).
* Trying to sell bonus miles (correct me if I'm wrong, but these seem like they're always bad value).
* Trying to sell trip insurance (this in particular seems as overpriced as "additional insurance" at a car-rental place).
As for the seat. It's not about caring about your seat, because the seats on the flight that sticks out in my mind were pretty much indistinguishable. It was a 2x2 plane and there were like dozens of "empty" seats to choose from even though the flight was over-sold by one person. I refused to pay and then ended up being the one getting bumped (although in this case it worked out in my favor since I got bumped to the next morning and got paid 4x my fare). They do not make it obvious when you're purchasing that you do not have a seat either, they just "skip" that stage and don't give you one. Very misleading.
https://gimletmedia.com/episode/2-free-throws-2/
A different style of talking about it of course.
Airlines are in my experience among the least ethically run businesses:
* They will cancel a flight at the last minute stranding passengers because it was "undersold".
* They will delay flights for reasons that have no accountability to consumers.
* They pass on 100% of the risk of flights being on time to consumers.
* They give gate attendants authority to claim your bag is "too large" for the overhead bin even when it fits just fine. They can even claim the overhead bins are full when they are not full.
* Airlines will try to make every seat on a plane "economy-plus" (when you have already purchased a ticket, but they haven't given you a seat assignment yet) when they are overbooked and the bump the passengers that don't pay.
On the contrary I challenge airlines to find one example where they act ethically even when their incentives are not to and the law would allow them to act otherwise.
On December 5, 1996 Alan Greenspan first uttered the phrase "irrational exuberance". Some people amazingly credit him with "calling the bubble" for this statement. The Nasdaq 100 closed at 835.80 that day, the lowest price the Nasdaq 100 has closed once the bubble "crashed" was at 804.64 on October 7, 2002.
This is the problem with "bubble watchers". Yes, it's possible for prices to get too high and for companies to trade at too high of valuations (or so it seems) and late 1990s had plenty of that. However, many people are constantly calling bubbles, people were calling the S&P 500 a bubble in this current rally back at 1200 and 1300. Could it go back down? Certainly, but that doesn't make the people calling it a bubble at 1200 correct if it drops from 2100 to 1800.
One of my favorite jokes about the subject: Bubble watchers have correctly predicted 9 of the last 2 bubbles.
Btw, for those interested in a sane economist talking about bubbles I highly highly recommend Scott Sumner. Here's a good old post of his on the subject:
It seems like both the original e-mail and the response were both within reason actually. Remember the second e-mail was not just responding to the first e-mail, but also to the reaction to the first e-mail.
Email 1 tldr: You might not realize that people find your cultural stereotypes offensive, please be considerate (although the explicit list of costumes felt a little too much like trying to give a pre-approved list of costumes).
Email 2: Not all things that are offensive should be banned, engage with people.
I however suspect that on the student level the discourse seemed much less civilized which is why the whole thing is blowing up.
I actually don't think the blond-haired girl example is a complete straw man. She was just trying to show that there was a large area between "probably okay" and "probably not okay" where people probably weren't able to agree, but people could still put outer bounds on. Also while this might not have been a complaint in the original e-mail, it very well could have been a complained the reaction to the first e-mail generated.
I think there are mix of issues going on here that are getting handled oddly.
1) Debating ideas versus the validity of groups. In my opinion if there's overt racism, there is room for the campus to intervene to make sure they have an inclusive environment. However if they're debating something (intentionally picking something else) like whether or not there should be dogs on campus or whether or not dog owning is a good idea in the abstract, this is a completely fair discussion. Unfortunately both types of discussions are happening which is making the debate more difficult.
2) Offensive speech Some people will hold and express ideas that others find offensive. As long as this speech is not designed to directly dehumanize or devalue contributing members of the community this probably has to be allowed to have a healthy dialogue.
3) Lots of poor judgement. I suspect many of the incidents (other than the overt racism which is separate) that have crossed the line were not intended to be offensive, but I think some of them were deeply offensive. If you do something deeply offensive I think it's reasonable to be received with a somewhat hostile reaction (demands for apology, anger towards group, etc). This is probably not the most effective way to engage people, better to try to explain why what they did is deeply offensive. I think it's completely reasonable for the school to try to encourage a positive, thoughtful interaction between people without trying to police every minor injustice.
A) Publicity. Do you want good headlines or bad headlines from the IPO?
B) Secondary sales: It's kind of silly, but if / when you go to sell more shares the people who have made money are more likely to buy (against all logic) because some of them think of the money they made as a cushion against losses.
C) Banks want to please their customers. Think of this as part of the fee for the IPO. Typical underwriting fees are 7%, but they could be 10%, all arbitrary, but they basically charge some extra points that they choose to give to their clients in the form of IPO allocation for continued business.
D) Those same banks in (C) might be the people who help the executives moves large blocks of stock in the future (not easy to sell 10 million shares of a company without having large price impact). Executives in particular want a good relationship with their underwriters and if they're too aggressive on price they might not get it.
Agreed that none of these are super compelling, especially for a very long-term owner like Zuckerberg.
As for the GUI, still needs to be built on top of something, why not this.
This actually looks really cool and I'm interested in checking it out. I've often thought about how cool it would be to have double entry accounting for every day life.