jo032

how could this possibly be worth it for RH? Their reputation is ruined with their core customer base and regulators are going to go after them now too

good luck starting an eccommerce business where everyone has to write you a money order. oh and you can't use amazon, ebay, or shopify either

you don't really believe what you're saying do you? that's like telling blacklisted hollywood writers and actors that they can make their own plays in their backyards

yes but practically big businesses can get away with these types of things without much fuss. even in the case where Apple and Google were caught wage-fixing, and there were emails from the CEOs blatantly colluding to prove it, all they got was a slap on the wrist. So it's effectively legal in my view

are you under the impression that the hollywood studios published an actual blacklist and openly admitted to collusion?

They didn't do that, just like the tech giants are not doing that now, as they take the same action at the same time against the same target.

you are being intentionally obtuse. there is obviously a difference between a t shirt vendor and 1/2 of a duopoly on online payments. the other of which also (coincidentally in your view) took the same measures to restrict people from using their services at the exact same time with no realistic alternative

again I'm not making a legal argument but a moral one.

>If the government can take away your rights, then they can take away mine too. I don't support that and will defend your rights as vigorously as my own, whether I agree with you or not.

This applies to Stipe and Paypal too. They can arbitrarily prevent anyone from operating an online business. The libertarian view that you should care more about their right to do that than individuals who will lose their livelihoods with no recourse, is something I'll never understand and we'll never come to agreement on.

when did I say Stripe didn't have the legal right to do this? I used the Hollywood blacklist as a parallel precisely because it too was a legal enforcement of political speech by a big consolidated industry that had the power to end peoples' careers

I only think it's morally wrong.

the civil rights act effectively does protect speech with regards to religion and sexual orientation, since the idea that we won't discriminate against those things as long as nobody finds out is not what it means

What you are saying is word for word the libertarian argument against the civil rights act ("if we have to bake a cake for gay weddings, what if wants a cake for their child bride!"). I happen to disagree with it as it applies in the real world

Hollywood is a private business as well. They were within their rights to make a blacklist. And people cheered on big business for protecting them and snitched on their friends to their employers, just like they're doing now

the poster you are replying to seems to be arguing that Qanon people should be a protected class under the civil rights act because it's a hokey pseudo religion with prophecies, shamans, and everything. That absolutely does apply to private companies. I don't really know what to make of that as I am not a lawyer, but I'm not making a legal argument but a moral one.

Internet businesses are natural monopolies and being banned from one can ruin your life without trial in a way that was unprecedented for private companies to be able to do in the past. In the near future somebody who is banned from both Paypal and Stripe will be close to being perpetually unbanked in some lines of work. The way progressives have cheered on giving tech companies this much power over our lives has been dispiriting

I think our history books do a disservice when they teach McCarthyism by focusing only on the falsely accused-- many Americans really did support the USSR and some even swore an oath to Stallin. The lesson should be that it was still a mistake to take civil liberties away from these people who passionately supported a horrible cause, not that McCarthyists were just bad prosecutors who arrested the wrong people.

I believe Trump supporters, especially the QAnon weirdos, are wrong to believe the things that they do, but they are less wrong than the people who supported the Soviet Union during its genocidal reign. Unless people are charged and convicted of a crime, their livelihoods should not be taken away by the whims of these powerful companies selectively enforcing their rules. McCarthyism was wrong then and it's wrong now, even though its targets are wrong too.

If you make 75K that's more than double the US median personal income and you still qualify for the checks. It's a good living in the US outside of a handful of cities. Also I think a lot of buyers are young people living with parents

fabien giesen, also at RAD, has a very informative blog as well. https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/

they have a seriously impressive group of developers

another round of stimulus checks is going to set bitcoin off on another bull run imo. you could see a drastic effect as soon as the $600 started hitting people's checking accounts

Thomas and Alito went out of their way to say that they thought Texas had standing but would still not grant further relief

I think people who have a healthy relationship with games agree with you, but for me, the obsessive grinding only made the games less challenging/fun, with no reward except larger numbers on the menus-- like if the reward for the Marshmallow test was just that you got to look at a bitmap of a pixelated marshmallow on tv.

Videogames are not all bad, and of course there are many healthy and successful people who enjoy them and appreciate them as works of art. But for me personally, I regret that I spent so much time doing busywork for an unpaid job that I didn't even enjoy.

Of the thousands of hours I spent playing single player videogames in my youth, a surprisingly small amount was spent having fun or doing anything interesting or challenging. It was mostly just tedious grinding on my overpowered Pokemon (and other rpg equivalents) against helpless enemies so that I could be even more overpowered against them.

I luckily grew out of it, but being absorbed by the pursuit of easy, digital approximations of real accomplishments, to the point where it impedes more difficult pursuits of the real thing in the real world, is a serious issue for many millennial men I know.

this is what I don't get though. Why mortgage your future earnings to take a MOOC from a random startup employee when you can get the same from a world class professor for free?

If you're self motivated enough to follow a curriculum on your own, you're probably much better off using online resources from MIT/Stanford/Harvard which are not only free but much better quality.

The learning environment described in the linked thread (200 students per teacher, plus blind leading the blind with volunteer mentors) sounds terrible at any price including $0.00. Many MOOCs have community boards, TA's, interactive assignments and cost little or nothing. If their plan is to just bundle that same experience with a job placement sales team and a private slack, then they'll just be yet another for-profit credential mill

again I asked one question. I was only a little bit curious because op's experience sounds a lot like what my friends and I did when the iOS app store first came out in college, so I was just wondering what platform people were having that experience on these days.

I see you are committed to being angry online so I won't stop you from following your passion, but I hope you see eventually that it is strange behavior.

I asked a single question and said I was just curious and didn't need specification lol.

why go out of your way to spread negativity?

totally understand you don't want to specify, but could you say what kind of product it was (ie mobile app, saas, udemy thing, crypto...etc)?

just asking as someone curious about this type of thing

Current employees are not the only revenue generators within a company, especially in a high margin monopoly business. Most of the value in Google was created over a decade ago when they achieved market dominance so revenue per employee is an unhelpful metric in their case.

I don't disagree with your other points, just the first.

Well of course you need a product. What I'm saying is that the median engineer at Big Tech does very little to influence it in any meaningful way(at least that was my experience, and people I know who have worked at Google/Facebook)

A tremendous amount of value was created by the early engineers of course and they still have top performers shipping new things. But as somebody who worked at one of these companies early in my career well after its monopoly was established, I felt like I was just given busy work to do.

Maybe not at Stripe, but a lot of big tech employees (especially at Google and Facebook) would get substantial paycuts if they got paid for the value they brought to the company rather than the market price ("as little as they can get away with").

the average FAANG engineer does a shockingly small amount of work that has any impact on revenue

Nikola unlike Apple has no track record of shipping anything.

But I do see your point about what they're doing (overhyping the future roadmap) being quite common. IMO the people comparing this to Theranos are wrong. Theranos sold a product to consumers that didn't have the capabilities it was advertised to have, whereas this is a transparently stupid company without a single product or customer except for the founder's self-dealing at his house. A lot of retail investors are gonna be hurt by this, but it's not clear to me that it's fraud