pexabit

This doesn't really make it clear how bitcoin is helpful. I think the trouble is getting valuable physical stuff into the area, not access to various payment systems or domestic transactions. It might well be true, but the article doesn't really tell us how.

Here is a post where people are discussing how they sent money to Gaza, some times to specific people they wanted to help, and crypto comes up but there are plenty of other options too.

Edit: Sorry, here. https://www.reddit.com/r/Crowdfunding/comments/17phhk4/best_...

What happened is adverse selection due to a stubbornly low valuation that doesn't even try to keep up, in the midst of a growing number of alternatives, worsened by a formal and therefore somewhat gameable process of getting in. The kind of person who really has an idea they are going to pursue regardless that he's actually committed to isn't going to part with his equity at the low prices a YC would offer. Instead what you get is people creating companies explicitly with the intention of applying for VC, which removes an important filter reflecting founder buy-in, and therefore average quality; and there's no way you can really tell one from the other.

I pay for my mail client (MailMate). I pay for my search(FoxTrot Search). I pay for my spam filter (Spamsieve). I pay for my notetaking/archival (Eagle Filer). I pay for my network monitoring (Little Snitch). There are alternatives to a lot of these they just aren't very good, in some cases astonishingly bad.

And I would pay an enormous amount of money for a browser that worked well that had features I've always imagined a browser should have. And I don't expect anyone to make that for me without the reward of getting nice stuff for doing so.

No one would bat an eye if Firefox were no more since there are other browsers more or less just as good, more or less just as bad. It's an immemorable product, the consumer surplus of which compared to the best alternative is very low.

Yeah advertising is a failure mode of what I said.

But if Firefox ever decided to make a lot of money by selling good browsers at a high price to paying users, well I think the result would be quite interesting.

Sometimes I marvel at what would be possible if just a sliver of open source talent was put to work building independent quality software for their own or an investor's profit. Marketing a product forces you to figure out what it is people actually need and deliver the knowledge and education people need to use a product well. In fact a lot of what is wrong with software from big tech companies is that individual programs are not written to make the program itself great, and the incentives generally do not encourage spending a lot of time making some part of Chrome or Safari more efficient.

Open source will never spend time marketing anything, never spend time educating an actual mass of general users as to its virtues or how to use it well, and suffer as a result. You don't have Desktop Linux that blows everything else out of the water because that would require investors to stake a lot of money doing these things, which they will only do if there is profit. PopOS gets as close as you might with something like that, but is ultimately shackled by the fact they cannot sell their software. (Enterprise is different, where I guess you can nerf the product to make money on servicing instead).

Even someone with infinite resources cannot do what a company selling something for a profit can because they are either ultimately captured by and beholden to some other interest other than the product itself, or constitutionally lack the energy to be daring and actually compete. Imagine what someone could do with a Firefox sold for a profit because of its superior functionality and superior efficiency.

This would be a good idea for ivory not so much fentanyl.

In this case, "supply creates its own demand" and in more than just the usual way.

Mexico can't dig itself out but the United States could quite easily crush the cartels and letting them continue is an active policy choice. (Consider the organized retail theft and carjacking in San Francisco and Chicago... these are not individual criminals, nor would the racket be profitable without an organized network carefully managing and allocating resources).

What are some of those reasons and why do you think Mexicans don't want that?

There is no race-neutral way to increase racial diversity by definition...

Helpful context would be that some groups in India can parlay their political power and social prestige into oppression certificates ("OBC") that lets them into top universities with scores much lower than everybody else. Which... fine... whatever -- politics is politics. But it is funny, delusional even, to see the author act as if these certificates should have any currency in the west.

there is absolutely no evidence universities are discriminating against OBCs and the guy who wrote this post does not present any.

pretty sure he would have posted his jee score if he got in without quota

That isn't really a useful comparison in a world where public or public-adjacent (bureaucratic committees operating by consensus) funding has totally crowded out rich funding interesting projects in terms of both dollars and status.

But wasn't always that way, and most of the science behind the modern industrial world was probably funded by rich guys sponsoring research at Cambridge or Edinburgh or wherever. The complaining scientists just don't like the accountability entailed by being funded by a real person very much.

Just addition with inside positive and outside negative (or vice-versa)

reddit.com/r/fatFIRE is a subreddit for rich people talking about rich people things and a surprisingly interesting resource.

New funding at high valuation imminent, wasting compute on the general public playing with it no longer makes much sense.

Going to be a little hard to credibly show the vaccine protects against infection when everyone is getting infected.

Knowing whether someone is vaccinated against COVID is not going to help you predict whether they have been or will be infected. Knowing whether someone had the smallpox vaccine is going to help you predict whether they had been or would become infected. See the difference?

That isn't relevant because there is no evidence that the vaccine reduces your risk of suffering from myocarditis after infection. (It isn't even necessarily true, but that is a separate matter).

What is your back of the envelope math here? Clearly, the vaccine does not prevent infection. There is no evidence it reduces the incidence of harmful sequelae following infection. So how does this add up to support mandatory vaccination for young men?

Price functions to clear the market. If the MSRP is too low, then you are going to find waiting lists. It is not like dealers like selling at a price that forces them to carry more inventory than they need to operate.

Ford could do this, but cars are expensive assets that are hard to move around and so subject to changes in local demand, macroeconomic circumstances, etc. Ford would not be able to successfully push flat pricing onto its dealers, because the dealers discover the price that clears their local market.

Maybe I am wrong about this, but the price you pay at a dealership is the spot price for a car now and here. The price you pay on the Tesla website is for a car some time in the future, some times an indefinitely far off time in the future. I suspect the spot price for a Tesla now and here is also fluctuating, opaque, and subject to negotiation.

Am I wrong?

I imagine estate tax revenue would increase more than tenfold if the rate were cut to something like 7 or 10 percent. As it stands, the estate tax collects less than $20 billion or so. This is a pretty paltry sum for a provision that has such an effect on how people do various things. The purpose is clearly not to raise revenue. It is just a massive subsidy for lawyers and the rapidly growing non-profit / foundation sector.

They are not.

They are funded by a long-term, zero interest note from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton.

Ads were much more relevant in a time when micropayments were much less feasible than they are today. There isn't any good reason Facebook can't charge $40/year if they commit to making it good again (e.g. rolling back to 2011 or so) and hosting only the highest paid ads (e.g. Superbowl level production values).

Mathematica license.

The tell is that you cannot even pay more to buy ME-disabled hardware when it is obvious that there is plenty of money in it, at little additional cost to Intel. The workaround in me_cleaner was originally intended for government buyers that demanded it. And they probably had good reason to demand it.

The many states and countries that had record outbreaks, the fact they were exceedingly well-vaccinated notwithstanding. (Vermont, Israel, etc. etc. this is pretty trivial to verify).

It just does not prevent transmission. We know what it looks like as far as transmission goes for vaccines that work (smallpox, oral polio, etc.) This is not it. Just isn't.

It does not even discernibly prevent infection or transmission.

Considerably out-of-the-money options on social media companies expiring this Friday are up very substantially, so whether the source is credible or not there is money acting as if it is.