rburhum

Just me, without a twin, change beards all the time (shave it, grow it, shape it, etc).

I have also have friends who do contact sports (brazilian juijitsu) and trust me, their ears change shape all the time.

I dont have any personal friends that box, but man, I can also see that not working so well.

Simplicity is often an important overlooked killer feature.

And this is exactly the polar oppossite of that!

A friend of mine that has been doing ICOs behind the scenes (there is an entire methodology that makes them successful that include some questionable marketing techniques) has been pushing me to do an ICO. But one of the requirements is that the service you provide is directly tied to the currency itself. This file storage service is a perfect example of that. A cryptocurrency looking for a service that works with a paradigm vs a service that just centers on being useful for customers. I am just not interested in doing that...

I can't deny that this has been useful and profitable for him. Here has been doing successful multimilliondollar ICOs where he charges 100k a pop. To me, it just seems like such a scam to take advantage of this bubble, that I'd rather just build a healthy successful business "the old way"

- What is the most messed up scenario that you have seen where a founder got ripped off?

- What about the other way around?

There are several things I personally _hate_ about python, but there is a cost-benefit that comes from engineering new things. What new problems are we going to be able to solve by using a new language? If the answer is clear (e.g. imperative programming vs declarative/functional programming let you solve different kind of problems) then it makes sense to do. If certain constructs enable you to completely avoid a recurring mistake (e.g. garbage collection), then it may make sense.

But this?!?!? No man, you don't need a new language to fix this.

The thing is, this was the second call I had gotten from the same phone number. First time they called was 4 months ago, so I added them to my address book as "Mr Scam". I told my friend about this, and we decided to call them back again today on speaker... they answered! So I asked them for their bank account so I could transfer them $100k. They said no, go to target and buy a gift card. I quickly asked "ok, so I can only buy $100 gift cards... how many do I need?" The guy struggled and could not answer, so I walked him through the math and taught him a trick to remove zeros - it was hilarious! Then the guy caught on, got upset, and told me to "to stop calling, they are just trying to work there". It was funny and disturbing at the same time.

In case you want to prank the scammers, feel free to call them to +1 (208) 501-0873. The phone seems to only work during US business hours - call a few times and you will get these bastards :)

What really surprised me was how horrible the FB system to report stuff like this is. It is basically non-existant. If this thing takes 1 month to be reviewed, that is 1 (eternal) month where the damage can be irreversible.

what is worse is that FB has posts about how they are "fighting" this without having any instructions or obvious process defined to report this. So you "report inappropriate content" and the report goes to a black hole while the perpetrator continues with their shenanigans. They dont even need to create a new acct, because they can keep going without the offending account getting blocked.

Something else is that the non-profit foundations that exist to fight this (the ones that will send legal take-down notices) are US-centric. This means that if you are from a latin american country and you face this (as was this particular case), you are screwed.

Yes obviously the lesson is not to take pics like that in the first place, but sadly a lot of the victims may not be that computer savvy or mature enough to realize what a mistake those things can be.

You want to read about law 936 and also understand that the bonds were sold to retirement funds and individuals. 22% of the debt is by local agencies. If you listen to the podcast (or read the transcript) it will make more sense.

There is an English transcript there and a lot of stats. The pension funds, for example, are effectively the people of PR.

The short version is that a lot of the debt is held by the people of PR themselves in form of bonds that were sold when the economy was good.

The reason it was artificially good is that for a long period it had great US tax benefits when compared with other US territories/states. During that time several corporstions (particularly pharma) had factories and jobs there. During that time there was a boom in bond sales - a lot of predatory practices that are reminiscent of the US housing bubble were done there, too. Once the tax loophole was closed, corporations left the island, jobs went to shit, the bonds could not be repaid, and all well, you get the picture. Except that in this case, "not paying debt", literally means not paying a huge chunk of all the life savings that people poured (arguably even patriotically) to their own bond system (see the parallels to the housing crisis?).

You could technically boost the enconomy there by reintroducing similar tax loopholes, but it would be a temporary fix, and there would be significant struggles in the Senate and Congress... Taxation without representation sucks big time...

Link to podcast:https://16683.mc.tritondigital.com/NPR_510315/media-session/...