kingstoned

I use PayPal when buying digital products priced in USD because local banks approve those transactions automatically. When I try to pay via card directly, I have to call them to enable those transactions which is a hassle. It's not surprising PayPal is popular internationally.

"I’ll tell you why I like the cigarette business. It costs a penny to make. Sell it for a dollar. It’s addictive. And there’s fantastic brand loyalty."

- Warren Buffett

How would a new bootstrapped startup founder maximize his or her chances of being approved for an O-1 visa? Would it be better to focus on the E-2 visa instead, where the criterion is mostly money invested?

  "One thing that makes me skeptical about the EU long term is the way they seem to view regulation not as an unfortunate necessity, but as an exciting project."

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1050787382390329345

I don't serve ads on a website and I'm not blocking users who use adblockers. I'm trying to find a reliable way to detect usage of adblockers for legitimate analysis.

Do you know a way to do it?

I'm not trying to block people who use adblockers or make experience worse. There are other reasons why someone might want to know if some portion of users are using adblockers. I personally use uBlock.

Do you know a reliable way to do it?

What is the best way to detect if a user has enabled uBlock or Adblock? I wanted to do it for a project I'm working on, but many solutions fail.

I hope AI voice tech like https://beta.elevenlabs.io/ will make audiobooks even better.

AI is the new Climate Change

India, like Brazil is perpetually the "country of the future".

Given how successful Quaero (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero) was, I'm sure this will be another major success from Europe.

The bottom billion are mostly self-sufficient farmers or hunter-gatherers. Money is only relevant in an interconnected modern economy. A small tribe of hunter-gatherers or a small farming village has a GDP of 0, but they have the basics covered.

For people who like these kinds of websites, there is a classic search engine: https://wiby.org/

Let's read their next quarterly report in 10 days to see if ChatGPT caused a revenue decline in their search business.

Interesting. Could you please share some links about it?

I just read: https://graymirror.substack.com/p/gpt-4-invalidates-the-turi.... It makes the point that LLMs are not AIs, so we will need a different approach if we want a true AGI, not just incrementaly improving on the current LLM approach.

You could hire 10 hookers every month in Thailand or Colombia for that kind of money.

Private does not mean for-profit. Funding and performance are two different things. Road construction is funded by government, but performed by private companies.

Judging by how underwhelming Bard is, I think they are toast, but at least they have YouTube:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1620539538476249088

Philip Greenspun wrote about how looting public corporations in modern societies is the equivalent to kleptocracy in the 3rd world:

https://philip.greenspun.com/politics/israel/

Good article to read: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/will-ais-take-al...

Going to the nanny state to bail them out of the consequences of their bad choices

Your explanation for why Americans (or anyone else) are rich is incomplete.

I suggest you read this paper ("Why Isn't the Whole World Developed? Lessons from the Cotton Mills"):

https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/210a/reading...

We're talking companies, not open-source projects, protocols or non-profits.

Europe has a bigger population than the US, so listing competitors that are much smaller than their US equivalents is not a good sign.

Those companies located in the EU are mostly owned by US and sometimes Chinese investors. The reverse is not true - most US companies are almost exclusively owned by Americans. Americans own around half of all global financial wealth.

Even Spotify is mostly owned by US investors and pays out most of the money to US music companies and recently to US podcasters.

Unfortunately, Europe strongly embraces socialism [1] and is hostile to entrepreneurs. According to a study [2]:

  "Western Europe is shown to underperform in all four measures of high-impact Schumpeterian entrepreneurship relative to the U.S. Once we account for Europe’s strong performance in technological innovation, an “entrepreneurship deficit” relative to East Asia also becomes apparent. This underperformance is missed by most standard measures. Finally, we also find that China performs surprisingly well in Schumpeterian entrepreneurship, especially compared to Eastern Europe."

[1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2016/0... [2] https://www.ifn.se/media/2rvl3xy3/wp1170.pdf

If healthcare is a right, who are you proposing to provide those services? How do we ensure healthcare workers are available to provide the services? What about their right to not participate?

True. In developed, rich countries with welfare state and feminism, women don't need individual men. Instead, they can rely on government and corporations to be their protector & provider. When ecological pressures are relaxed, sexual selection (i.e. looks) becomes the dominant factor in mate selection.

I suggest you read this blog:

https://sirtyrionlannister.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/how-the-...

Healthcare services are a right in many countries. Sex can be put in a similar category. Just like lacking access to healthcare can lower the quality of your life, so can being alone and sexless. Healthcare services are a very intimate activity as well.

It's like saying that healthcare access with attractive nurses is not a right. It's not, but healthcare in many countries is a right.

I suggest you read this:

https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/06/comparing-income-sex-...

  “It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”

― Michel Houellebecq, Extension du domaine de la lutte