qroshan

This is every Blockchain project ever

Solving imaginary problems and doing a terrible job at it

If the dollar gets devalued, then there is inflation, which the increase is tied to

I'll trust techies the day they actually are in the job of protecting people and have to deal with real danger of bad actors continuously trying to blow up Western democracies.

It's funny the tech/security/sysadmin guys complain that their work is appreciated only when things go wrong, but fail to give the same benefit of the doubt for US law and order.

It all depends on who is doing the attacking. If the attacker is a state government or someone with billions of dollars and compute to spare, ASICs aren't going to fight this losing battle. Heck, you can buy off the ASIC miners for a few million dollars (all we have to cover is their net profit, which is pretty low)

If the liquidity is enough, 1) Short Bitcoin to the tune of several Billion dollars. 2) Do a 51% attack and essentially prove it's worthlessness. 3) Profit

The Market Cap of Bitcoin is $184,000,000,000

Theoretically, I can spend that much to make it's value go to $0. (yes, there are liquidity and other concerns, but you get the point)

If my goal is to re-purpose, I would use a General Purpose Computer

The Market Cap of Bitcoin is $184,000,000,000

I have plenty of money to play with.

So, if I were a hedge fund, I can effectively short Bitcoins and spend a piddly amount to build a datacenter to carry a 51% attack. If the attack fails, I can re-purpose my datacenter

Rule # 1 of any economic analysis:

Analysis done during boom periods (low unemployment, high stock market) is worthless. During the dot com, housing and crypto bubbles, there were many trends of people doing X.

As Buffett says, "It's only when the tide goes down, you'll see who is swimming naked".

Real trends survive recessions and market busts. Take everything else with a grain of salt

driving is not an issue. Parking on the street would definitely be

I'm pretty sure, the conditions that would lead one's switch to main grid would be similar to everyone resulting overloading the main grid which pretty much the article is alluding to. It matter diddly squat if I save 5c an hour if I have to pay $1000 / hour during over load

Pray tell me how exactly should a news publisher survive without targeted advertising. Public should pay for stuff or accept targeted advertising

The article actually gave you hints as to how to evaluate

Marginal Cost of Servicing an Extra Uber Driver is $0 Marginal Cost of Servicing an Extra Uber Passenger is $0

Uber is a Tech Company.

"The most in a decade" is where all the shenanigans of the article lie.

Let's say Peak 2006, Sub-Prime Loan was $600B

Let's say the average, natural Sub-Prime Loan is $100B

After the crash, may be the market over-corrected way to much and slowly crawling back to it's natural $100B.

With this perspective, the narrative becomes totally different. The lending standard is still too tight and still way below what the natural / average economy support. Remember there has to be a balance between exuberance and over-cautious. A journalist should find out, what the happy medium is

That's why numerical literacy is important

You have to be careful about that sentence. The only other options is to sell $ for another currency.

Anything that they buy things that are denominated in $ are usually US imports hence goes back to the net export calculation.

Of course they can also use to buy global commodities like Gold, Oil which are denominated in $$, but that is just a proxy for selling $ in foreign exchange and using that currency.

So, logically only 2 options. Sell US $ in FX or buy US assets (Bonds, Stocks, Real Estate)

They can always sell dollars in foreign exchange for other currencies, local currencies or gold or bitcoin.

The reason they hold $ is a 'belief in our currency won't inflate' (by monetizing debt) which implies 'belief in our debt' If China is a net exporter to Argentina or Venezuela, rest assured they are selling those currencies as fast as they can

Again, this is someone who doesn't understand economics

Broken Windows is actually not a fallacy (classic Keynsian vs Hayek argument) If past decade has proven anything. Keynsian economic policies worked (printing money forcing people to spend) while a Austrian Austerity would have been disastrous.

Again, HN will not understand the side effects of destroying a major ecosystem. They all think they are much smarter and can stand on their own and VC money has no effect on their livelihood and it's their superior linux skills that keep them making tons of money

Good VCs almost never fund the idea, but the team. So, if Atul Gawande comes up and ask that question, he most surely will get it

Most of HN don't understand that the Advertising ecosystem is what is feeding the tech boom and their livelihood. Just like housing it is an entire ecosystem now with many people's jobs and livelihood is based on.

Hit that ecosystem and you get a recession. However it doesn't stop at the recession. Most VCs are funding hundreds and thousands of startups with the hope that one of them is going to get sold to Google or Facebook or Amazon or any of the Advertising Cash Cow business. Dry that tap and you'll have VCs pulling money from Tech.

Now, there is glut of Programmer supply and a severe lack of investments. Not dissimilar to 2008.

Shipping, Container and Architecture are all prominent Software terminology.

In fact, any HN reader who didn't think that should be perma banned ;)

Huh? Clearly you are clueless about Tesla's financials.

Tesla's gross margin is a piddly 18%. They also need money to build and maintain service centers, super charger networks (all needed because Tesla doesn't have a dealer network or a gas network).

Then there is debt servicing, working capital, maintaining their plants, inflationary effects of labor wage (as their labor pool gain experience). All these are not discretionary R&D.

Tesla is fundamentally unprofitable and Musk suddenly has realized this and hence the major pivot to FSD (which is about 15 years away)

Huh? Give 10 bucks to Bill Gates and 10 bucks to the homeless person that you just saw and tell me who would spend it immediately?

which part of savings glut do you not understand?

I'm very much a non-religious person, but as a science person you absolutely have to question the almost glaring correlation between people properly practicing religion and discipline, happiness, and procreation.

1,000,000 tickets

$100 loss per ticket

Total loss for Google: $100,000,000 Google's cash balance is $120,000,000,000 Google's operating income in 2018: $30,000,000,000

Co-ordination and system changes required to pull this trickery for airlines probably: $100,000,000 (and not even sure if it's legal)

Can't believe how naive hacker news is when it comes to business and change-management and legal and pretty much everything else

To use a Computer Science paradigm. Performance (Efficiency) is not the end goal, but performance (efficiency) acts like currencies so that you can 'buy' other things from it.

classic HackerNews discussing how business is run. Elitist at best.

and of course charging times, cold weather performance, real range (it's funny how advertising pamphlets are taken on face value as facts)

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM will all 'embrace' block-chain for the same reasons explained here...

https://medium.com/@qroshan/block-chain-solving-imaginary-pr...

"Service Providers like Amazon/IBM have nothing to lose to give ‘Block-chain-as-a-service’ for any one willing to fork their money for such things. They are happy to take your money. Just like a stock broker, the more you use their compute power to do utterly useless things the more profitable they are."