Feel free to just drop the "software" part, since it's a mouthful, and just call yourself a "lawyer." What's the difference anyway, we're all just typing words and numbers into computers at the end of the day.
850 karma · joined May 1, 2018
I see this as the best argument for legalizing. The harm done to these countries by the "war on drugs" is at such a scale that war reparations from the US ought to be paid after they legalize this crop.
The cardinality of the natural number set is the same as the cardinality of the rational number set. So, in some sense, you are saying that we know that the natural counting numbers are "real," which is a self-evident truth. In another sense, you are saying that fractions of an inch/cm/etc are "real" which is another self-evident truth.
The question is whether uncountable infinity somehow exits in nature (in the case of real numbers, it is a question about the infinitesimally small scale). To say that it's a "polite fiction to make some proofs works" is too strong a statement, we do not know the answer to that question. At the same time, our measurement instrument will always be discrete and bounded, so the question is seemingly beyond science itself.
Not really. We saw a lot of LBO takeovers before the market turned, and Zendesk is one of those (it was planned 6 months ago). LBO activity is expected to slow down now (it already has).
What you will likely see a rise in is a lot of companies cutting costs and going into their bunkers. You don't necessarily need to be taken over a PE firm in order to do that.
That's pretty much it. The VCs, at the height of the bubble, were forcing startups to take far more funding than they needed. A startup company can't just sit on the cash and do nothing with it, the funding needs to be put to work ASAP in order for the VC companies to justify having provided the funding.
Most startups are software companies, so they have limited ability to spend those mountains of VC money on capital expenditures. They can't spend their VC funding on building a factory or something. The largest expense in a software company is human resources, so that's what they end up spending their funding on (even if it's not in the best interest of the founders, employees or customers).
> Personally I don't quite understand why a founder would want to take a huge pile of money and then burn it as fast as possible trying to hit some hyper-growth target, when they could instead take a small amount of money and set up a stable revenue-earning business
They don't have a choice. If they don't accept the huge pile of money, they get nothing. The VC business model isn't compatible with slowly building a stable revenue-earning business. From the private equity investor's point-of-view, if they wanted to invest in a stable revenue-earning business, they can just go and do a leveraged buy-out of a well-established, stable revenue-earning business (like a health care business, or an older enterprise SaaS business, etc.) and skip all the risks associated with the startup phase. They only want to invest in a startup if it's a hyper-growth moonshot, and they don't mind burning founders, employees, customers and their own money in the process because they only need 1 in 100 startups to succeed and the other 99 are just tax write-offs for them.
Would love to know more ...
Look into how many CEOs and executives of large corporations are former McKinsey partners.
The most concerning thing about this is that public auditing firms are supposed to be the entities keeping everyone else honest. The whole financial system is based on a chain of trust that starts and ends with auditors. If you can't trust the external auditors, then you can't fully trust anything. This is the world we live in.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-kpmg-cheating-scandal-...
More like US politics has imposed a global capitalist free-for-all on this front for their benefit, and the consequences are catching up. One faction maybe will want to have some governance and regulation down the road, while the other faction wants Donald Trump back on Twitter.
Yeah ... the problem is, you can't charge a corporate millions of dollars for that off the bat, but you sure can charge the millions of dollars for software licensing. And they are happy to pay it. In fact, they want to pay to it, it makes them feel more secure and they have a budget to use.
I imagine that the majority of white collar workers are employed by large corporations, and so the majority have to deal with this.
Given the number of startup layoffs happening, I imagine a lot of people will be having their first experience with large corporate bureaucracy.
> To get anything done is emotionally exhausting.
Onboarding as a new hire is usually the most frustrating period, because you need to request a lot of things and can't get any work done in the meantime. Eventually you have enough access that you can at least do work while waiting on other requests.
One thing that helps is knowing how to use the corporate tracking system to know which individual specifically the request is stuck on, and then relentlessly following up with that individual via email until they approve your request.
You should also track your tasks and identify the ones that are stalled because you're waiting on a request, and then regularly show the list to your manager (along with your follow up efforts). That way you have a solid reason for not getting those tasks completed.
In fact, all forms of security would be compromised. However, quantum cryptography is a thing. For example, China recently launched an actual, working, "ultra-secure" satellite communication system based on quantum crypto (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-reaches-new...).
A fully realized quantum computer would be able to factor prime numbers in linear team using Shor's algorithm, and therefore would break the assumptions public-key cryptography at currently used key sizes. My rough understanding is that quantum cryptography is magic that provides an answer to this problem, so that if/when quantum computing is advanced enough to break all classical cryptography, there will also be a secure quantum based cryptographic capability to counter that threat.
I don't know if there is work on applications of quantum cryptography to blockchain specifically. Seems like a very interesting question.
Also, it turns out that the pay for classical musicians is horrendous and almost anything to do with performing arts is a terrible career choice (even before COVID).
The consequences of the 2008 financial crisis reverberated for over a decade, and then COVID-19 pandemic arose and the government decided that it wasn't going to make the "same mistake" again and started bailing out everyone. However, they overshot, misallocated funds, caused runaway inflation, then failed to recognize the persistent inflation and acted too late to curb it. That brings us to today, where there is ongoing speculation about whether this will be a "soft landing" or a "hard landing." If history is any guide, then I think that this kind of market situation this means we can expect another spectacular crash in the near future. The consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent rescue operation were still unresolved when the pandemic began, because the Fed had not figured out how to unwind its bloated balance sheet from all those years of Quantitative Easing. Just when the Fed thought it would start unwinding, the pandemic hit, and the Fed balance sheet grew astronomically. Now, for the first time in decades, the Fed is facing the runaway inflation that "common sense" would have predicted, and they have no choice but to initiate a "rug pull" on the economy in order to bring inflation under control. This will only end when the US consumer is bruised badly enough to reduce consumption, which will put the economy into a tailspin which will cause massive wealth destruction for investors. It's hard to see how the Fed can keep kicking this can down the road. Somewhere along the way there will be a black swan event. Perhaps Russia will choose to escalate cyber, kinetic and/or economic warfare against NATO at the very moment that a US market crash is occurring.
I sincerely hope that I'm wrong, but my Spidey Sense is tingling like it's 2001 or 2008.
Your intuition about ethical dilemmas in finance is not entirely misplaced. I know all the arguments about finance and trading being useful because it is the process by which capital is "efficiently" allocated in the real economy, but that's academic fantasy which ignores how the real world works. The truth is, in order thrive in finance (and, by extension, crypto) you need to be someone who is perfectly happy being "ethically flexible."
By the time you start running into these ethical dilemmas, you're typically in too deep and it's too late to get out. You justify it to yourself because you're just a small cog in a big machine who can't change anything and you need to earn a living (and have gotten too dependent to a certain level of income that you can't earn anywhere else at that point). You can relatively easily make as much as a doctor or lawyer, but I can assure you that in a successful finance career you will need to "ethically flexible" whether you like it or not. A doctor can go home knowing that they saved lives, in finance you'll feel the pretty much the exact opposite.
You said the competition for postdoc is rather fierce, the competition for other jobs (e.g. AI and finance jobs) is just as fierce if not more. Basing your decision on fear of competition is not a good idea because every career or job is highly competitive.
You need to pick a track and work on it. Significant learning is part of it, but I should also mention that your network is equally important if not more. You need to build your network. One way to do this is to stay in touch with people you went to school with, not least because some of them will get jobs in your target field, and they might be able to help bring you onboard. Another way to network is to ask out people you don't know (e.g. that you find on LinkedIn, or profs or whatever) for "coffee" to learn about their industry - this is known as an "informational interview," you can Google the term to learn more. Good luck!