As they make money on each trade of Bitcoin they are doing quite well financially even if Bitcoin prices aren't shooting to the moon.
4,107 karma · joined March 15, 2012
Questions can be raised about some of his specific donations, but when someone gives away $8B of his wealth, spending nearly none on himself, does it globally, influences other billionaires to do the same, picking at any one of his specific donations seems counter productive.
Yes Cornell is an Ivy League school, but it is where he went to school, he probably has very strong ties to that school, perhaps met his wife there, or his business partner, if he chooses to give back to that school that is also good.
Plus there was a tremendous amount he gifted to "education" so without knowing all of the details, hard to imagine that he didn't provide some sort investment in to under represented communities. If he helped Vietnam with their healthcare he obviously wasn't just US centric but helped where he though his donation could have an outsized return.
By the way he gifted a large amount of money to the Obamacare campaign, so by proxy, he was providing healthcare to his workers, and more likely than not.
I mean the largest EV manufacturer is Tesla and they name their company Nikola?
It’s like years ago when public companies would rebrand as blockchain companies and see their stock soar.
If its a credit card processing fee that should be 2-3%. With value added services maybe 10-15% but that would be the ceiling.
Apple charges these fees because they can.
However the article is a bit click-baity as it was really about a decrease in sales for Tesla due to the pandemic, not because someone else outsold them.
In regards to DigitalOcean's load balancing other providers often have a free tier so they have to have a version of load balancing (or routing) built out to direct requests to containers that are spun up to execute your code. With DigitalOcean it's for running deployment apps and we currently do not have a free tier. As such the load balancing there is really meant to distribute load either for redundancy or because a single Droplet is no longer efficient at handling the level of traffic you are receiving.
So that $10/mo load balancer gets you a dedicated pair of DigitalOcean load balancer droplets that are just yours and no one else's and can be configured for load balancing. You need a pair, because if one goes down, that is where your traffic is routed so your site would be offline. So by having two you get redundancy immediately.
I would say that unless you have a significant amount of traffic load balancing isn't really necessary.
And while redundancy is great, remember that anything you add, adds technical complexity, and also introduces other failure states. So while it does at redundancy it also adds overhead of management as other services can now fail.
People got wealthy invested into funds or started funds and are now committing capital back.
Having a hard time raising money is an issue but that’s because 90% of companies fail. As such that is too risky for a bank to lend into so you need to go to other segments.
There is this false assumption that a wealth tax will somehow eliminate wealth inequality.
If you have an already broken economic system you will end up with more money in a broken system and it won't yield better results for the average person.
But this is about marketing and "winning" not about progress.
If you want to actually help people you should start with property taxes.
Increase them to 10% on a sliding scale as property values move further away from the median price of a home sold in a state or city.
This would discourage multiple home ownership, it would drive tax revenue that stays inside of the local community (state level) rather than creating a larger budget for the military. You could use those taxes to improve education and local infrastructure. Impose a system where those collected taxes are then redistributed on an economic basis where the poorer neighborhoods receive a larger percentage of those local taxes.
If you buy a $2M house in just 10 years you would have paid $2M in taxes. By increasing the carrying cost of property you will also reduce property prices as this is no longer an asset that you carry with zero cost.
To further improve the cost of housing make sure that there is a 100-200% tax on foreign buyers buying property in US markets. This will again drive down prices and help people afford houses.
Unlike paying into a large federal tax system where the effects are harder to observe you would see improvements on the local area immediately. Property prices would decrease, poorer neighborhoods would be helped which would lead to a reduction in crime and poverty levels, and your infrastructure that has been classically underinvested will receive more funding.
Low property taxes also lead to higher costs of tuition. By also removing the inability for people to get out of student debt through bankruptcy you would also decrease the price of education. And if we used the additional tax revenue from property taxes to create additional "vocational" schools for the new economy such as computer programming programs you can help people get ahead.
If you want people to be civicly minded you have to show them how their taxes have an impact and that starts at the local level first.
Think of it like this if I'm in an industry and polluting the river. Do you want to raise taxes on me so that I stop polluting, or do you want to just make that illegal?
When there are things that completely don't make sense I don't think taxes are the solution.
If I can buy a house which costs more than education in a lot of cases with a mortgage and then declare bankruptcy and not have the mortgage follow me for the rest of my life why can't I do the same with a student loan? Taxing the student loan companies won't solve that.
Similarly for the large disparity in prices for healthcare for out of pocket vs through insurance.
Neither one of these is getting fixed by simply increasing tax revenue alone.
When I goto the hospital and get an MRI and get billed through insurance and the cost is $2,000 and out of pocket I can pay $200 for the same procedure that looks like legalized fraud.
The same can be said for education. When the majority of student loans are given in such a way that a student can't default out of it, it reduces the risk on the lending party and so they give out a ton of cash and prefer the interest payments later on which raises the price of education.
Property taxes are also inherently low and should be raised and redistributed to lower income neighborhoods especially when so much property is already in the hands of the wealthy.
I would love to see higher property taxes because I have more faith in local governments than the larger bureaucracy.
- US Population 2000: 280 Million - US Population 2020: 320 Million - +15% increase in population
- Tax revenues 2000: $2.03 trillion - Tax revenues 2019: $3.50 trillion - +75% increase in tax revenue
Population grew 15% and tax revenue grew 75% and yet we still can't solve any of the real problems we had since 2000. So what is increasing taxes going to do if we already collect 75% more and can't make a dent.
Now let's say you tax the billionaires: - Jeff - $200B - Larry & Sergey - $130B - Bill Gates - $120B - Zuck - $100B - Warren Buffet - $80B - Larry Ellison - 71B - Elon Musk - $70B That's $770 Billion - let's say we double this for the remainder of billionaires to $1.5 trillion and add in a 70% tax.
$1.5 trillion in wealth = $1.05 trillion in year 1
Now what about the following year? Well you reduced their wealth substantially so now you only have $500B and that would only yield $350B in tax revenue the following year.
$350B in tax revenue year 2.
And there after it basically trickles down to nothing.
So you end up with a total of $1.5 trillion and then nothing. Well that $1.5 trillion is 42% increase over what we have today, but remember that tax revenue already increased 75% and we still couldn't get anything right.
So while it may sound good to say tax the billionaires the reality is if we couldn't figure out how to spend the additional $1.5 trillion from taxes between 2000 and 2020 a one-time 2 year increase of $1.5 trillion won't do much because the underlying system is broken.
Post-covid certainly have been doing most of the cooking at home.
Now it's probably 50/50 depending on the week.
However with the pandemic and a significant amount of people moving out of the city, coupled with retail closures and bankruptcies hopefully this rent gouging will come to a natural end.
The NYC real estate market is going to shed quite a substantial amount of value over the next 3-5 years and very likely prices will drop considerably. Perhaps 30-50% especially at the high end. The lower end will be a bit insulated because of demand and also because the prices there haven't seen as much of a run-up as the higher end apartments.
You don't have to kill the competition in social to win, you just need to stop their growth. They can retain some percentage of users but if the growth is stalled out and you are dominate them in 5:1 marketshare it's as good as dead.
Any car you are in is traveling with kinetic energy, so it is likely to bounce and move around over the road surface. Without a physical button to rest your finger on it's nearly impossible to get something on the first "touch" unless you are standing still.
Yes it looks cool, and yes it's fun to play with on a red light, but using any of these touchscreens even at 50 mph is nearly impossible.
Made much worse if it's a sports car and has a bit of a stiffer suspension.
One step forward, two steps backwards.
I did need to do a repair on the motherboard as it stopped charging but one repair after 7 years is crazy.
If he had stolen the IP, and the acquiring company decided to pay $0 for it and not take it, then your assessment would be correct.
But a company decided that those assets were worth north of $100MM and paid for it.
I just wanted to make sure that it was purely for entertainment and I wasn't missing something about the bigger picture here. =]
I could certainly be very wrong, but this just seems like a circus act. Everyone is going to express their outrage but will there be an real change?
Will Apple have its 30% cut of app-store sales changed?
Will google stop showing google results at the top?
Will google be forced to actually not show ads on trademarked brands for their competitors?
White collar crime steal $179MM of assets and get 27 months of home arrest.
Blue collar crime rob a bank to steal $10,000 and spend 10 years in prison.
Their cost is less than .01 cents per gb and look at their published pricing for customers.
And I’m including networking equipment as well as head count in my cost, not just the cost of pipes.
As a product it was very interesting, but it had pitfalls. It wasn't exactly clear where to store it. The people who saw it all had houses and garages, but for the everyday user in the city hard to figure out where you would put it after each use. Even bicycles are challenging to store in NYC, which is why Citibike is interesting.
The second problem and much larger was the price point. If you want something to succeed you have to price it so that you can gain mass appeal. The $5,000-10,000 price point is a dead zone. As consumers we almost never spend this amount of money.
We spend hundreds of dollars all the time.
We spend a thousand or two thousand dollars infrequently, but we do it. Computers, vacations, some furniture.
But when you get to $5,000+ that is a price we pay very rarely. It is actually more common to find something more expensive, such as $10,000+ for a car, then to find $5,000. As a result it was hard to figure out where that price fit in.
Also, no one thought of subsidizing the cost. With the iPhone, it's expensive, but you have the carrier to subsidize the cost and more importantly create a monthly payment plan. If you could at least convert $5,000 to some sort of monthly fee that would help.
So what they really failed at is distribution. In fact if they planned around distribution they could have actually jumped on the entire citibike, jump, etc market before it ever existed.
It would also mean that customers wouldn't need to pay $5,000 out of pocket and instead could pay per use or a monthly fee.
Often people discount distribution when it comes to product market fit and failures.
Lastly, riding a bicycle is rather awkward. Think about learning it as a kid. It's counter intuitive. A bike can't stand on it's own, you have to pedal to go, if you stop it falls over. Though it is extremely unintuitive, it is cheap, you can try it, it has a culture, and is a rite of passage. So we learn this behavior even though it doesn't make sense.
The Segway is also counterintuitive in some ways. Looking at people riding them, never gives you a sense of confidence. There are also plenty of videos of people falling off of them, similar to bicycles.
But with a much higher starting point you aren't really tempted to try it, or even have access to one to test it out to see if it becomes intuitive or not.
Lastly, our cities aren't designed for this type of commute. People drive, they can take the subway, but the number of people that commute outside of that on bicycles is small in the US. In Europe like in Amsterdam, the Segway takes up more space in a lane than a comparable bicycle, so it really wasn't an improvement. And since Americans aren't used to bicycles they though oh wow this is great! Europeans were like for $50-$150 one time I can have a bike that lasts forever, doesn't require charging, takes up less space, and I already own it.
Sure it had pretty good graphics for the time, and gameplay was great as well.
But the real differentiator was the ability to "compete" with other people.
Not just compete, but the fact that you plopped down 25 cents and within 3 minutes one of your lost. At the time we didn't have much money, so 25 cents per game play was quite a lot. So it really came down to being great and trying to beat as many people as possible so that your 25 cents could last longer.
It was probably my first real memory of truly being competitive at life.
I think a lot of the survey is accurate. There will be a lot of people that decide to permanently relocate. It's already visible in the market data from rent because even as people are considering leaving, the second side of the equation is that people have stopped moving in.
These two factors together will create a shift whereby for the next two years rents will drop, however after that, as the world moves forward and recovers, SF will ultimately rebound as other metro areas as well.
This will be a short term solution, to a long term problem, in that there isn't enough housing supply in SF for the next decade unless this trend is permanent, which I don't believe that it is.