thawaya3113

Yet overall crime went down in the mid 90s all the way until the late 2010s.

Any explanation based on mental illness, lack of stable parenting, Ritalin, lack of community, etc. needs to explain why all these negative impacts only affect shootings in schools, while apparently far more mentally ill, drug addled 18 year olds decided to stop committing crimes outside schools in much greater percentages.

Instagram used to be good when it was largely used by professional food and travel bloggers.

These people weren’t pretending that this is their life and that you should feel terrible because your life isn’t cool. It was clearly a job, and the job was to share these great experiences with everyone else.

The problem was when these bloggers morphed into “influencers”. Influencers aren’t people whose job it is to show you cool stuff. Influencers are people whose job it is to live cool lives that you want to emulate. And the reason you want to emulate it is because they are always doing cool stuff.

The difference is subtle but highly consequential, IMO. The reason for the shift to influencers is that the food/travel blogger might be paid for an ad by the tourism agency of a place they visited, or a restaurant. Because you don’t want to be them. You want to gain information about traveling and eating from them.

But influencers make you want to be them, so now they can sell anything. The car they drive, the movies they watch, the toilet paper they use.

And the effect is that the former didnt make you feel bad about yourself, since the content made you think “ah, that’s a cool place I can go for my next vacation, or next birthday dinner is at that restaurant”, whereas an influencer makes you feel miserable cause you’re like “my life will never be as cool as theirs”.

Yes, but it’s a signed copy of a URL.

It’s like having the only key to the door to a room in which the Mona Lisa is kept.

Except the room is wide open other than the one wall with the door and freely accessible to all the visitors to the Louvre.

None of them will be able to walk in through your door to view it, although they can simply walk around it.

I don’t even know how I would develop with something like this.

My entire workflow is based around tens of little scripts I’ve written. Many scripts tend to be unique to a single project.

For example, I’m currently working in a project that’s based on an open source front end framework that has been discontinued for over 5 years. Creating a new component requires the creation of 3 different files with a ton of boilerplate. And there are many types of components that can go in different locations.

A simple Unix script means I can create all with the boiler plate in an instant. If I want to open a component it automatically opens all 3 files. And if I’m working on multiple bugs/features simultaneously I can create “workspaces”, by entering file names in a text file for each workspace and open each workspace instantly (or automatically on switching on my computer).

This is just one, probably least impressive, but extremely useful, piece of functionality I simply won’t be able to do (or if they provide some sort of API, it will require a bunch of code with a foreign API for me to execute).

Code is law.

Nearly all of Alphabet and Meta’s profits are not from customers paying them to use their product, but advertisers who are trying to convince FB/GOOG customers to use their products.

If those companies start disappearing, or cutting back on ad budgets, FB/GOOG don’t have a business model anymore.

Except the previous government gave out a lot more money.

Massive tax cuts, votes secured by giving over $40bn to farmers who were negatively impacted by a pointless and thoughtless trade war with China, and most of the COVID aid was given by the previous administration (although they did delay it because the previous President was insisting his name should be on a check that would be physically mailed to everyone).

I disagree with Biden’s tweet and Bezos’s tweet.

I personally believe that the vast majority of the inflation we are seeing today has nothing to do with government debt/deficits, so the government reducing its deficit will have minimal impact on inflation.

However, a lot of people do believe, or at least claim to believe, that inflation is almost entirely being driven by government deficits, in which case corporations paying more in taxes would certainly have an impact on inflation, so tying the two together is certainly not misinformation, and if this view is correct, then it will reduce inflation.

Arguably, MLB Advanced Media killed Netflix by commodifying streaming tech.

Using MLBAM, any company could set up high quality streaming services cheaply and instantly.

For example, WWE went from announcing they would be creating a streaming service to actually delivering a highly successful and glitch free one within months.

Netflix viewers used to be really good at rating movies and then getting recommendations based on those ratings. The Netflix ratings actually meant something once upon a time.

And then, one day, Netflix just got rid of this.

I’m still awestruck by the fact that they had this incredible and free source of data and they just relieved themselves of it.

Whether it’s interesting or not, what the FTX CEO described is literally a Ponzi scheme.

Numberphile lost me with their doubling down on their “sum of natural numbers is -1/12” video.

Horns are the stupidest thing ever. They have absolutely no positive value. And they keep getting louder because the people who hear them and are supposedly supposed to hear them are stuck in air conditioned enclosed cages so the only sufferers are the people who live in the area.

Horns should be illegal. It’s har side me to understand how stupid we are as a species that we think horns are ok.

Cracking down on people pressing their horns is far more important IMO.

There’s a great recent Bloomberg Podcast episode (Odd Lots?) where the CEO of FTX interactive is describing yield farming, and it dawns on everybody (Matt Levine states it explicitly) that what he is describing is a Ponzi scheme.

And then the CEO guy basically says that their old school finance may consider it a Ponzi but it’s the future of finance and they’re just gonna end up suffering from FOMO.

I’m not sure how the latter contradicts the former. In fact, it could also reinforce it.

With a limited number of available spots, and performance based pay, they would need to be more aggressive to ensure they have more candidates who go through the process faster to maximize the number of their own candidates that get recruited.

Volume doesn’t matter in terms of BTC’s operational capacity. It just reflects how 1 BTC is priced.

The number of transactions that can be made on the Bitcoin network is ridiculously low, which is why it can never be a currency.

What the “volume” represents is the high valuation of a Bitcoin and little else.

And if you further break down those transactions into those that are actual money transfers and payments, vs those that are just financial engineering within crypto or simply Converting money to and from BTC it will look pitifully small.

And Canada likely has better reporting as well (because countries with low crime usually tend to have better reporting and countries with high crime tend to have worse), so the true difference may be even higher.

Expect a lot of Indian and Chinese developers to move here from the U.S. as the prospect of having any stability in the US basically disappears.

We’ve had about 4 developers move to Canada already. I wouldn’t be surprised if retaining these developers is one of Microsoft’s intended goals of this “HQ”.

Go look up MPesa.

Been around as long as Bitcoin, and unlike Bitcoin it’s banking thr unbanked, allowing FG cheap transfers and being used in millions of real life transactions all across Africa.

So yeah, Bitcoin and most other crypto are a joke compared to actual real life in use technology.

Edit: Bitcoin does fewer than 300k transactions a day, so let’s be generous and say it does a million. That’s 365million transactions a year. MPesa has been regularly handling over 15billion transactions a year.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1139181/m-pesa-transacti...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/730806/daily-number-of-b...

This is exactly what’s happening with crypto.

A user’s transaction on Coinbase rarely represents an actual transaction on the blockchain. A transaction actually represents a row in a Coinbase SQL database, which Coinbase will eventually batch and then convert into a blockchain operation.

Skype’s quality, and subsequently popularity, dropped significantly after they removed the P2P bits.

There’s still nothing that comes close to the call quality Skype provided for long distance calls, especially when the network may not be as good on 1 end.

I suspect a lot of this is survivorship bias.

I suspect if one were to compare a large number of startups to one large company (or even better a portfolio of large companies), the “ruthless founders” will significantly underperform the middle management in large companies even after adjusting for the inherent advantages large companies have.

The only reason the “ruthless founders” look better is because we usually only talk about the successful ones because unsuccessful ones have disappeared.

Middle management is more successful and ruthless founders are less successful than immediate appearances would suggest.

The amount of energy and time spent on “politics” or “bickering over petty issues” is usually highly overstated by bloggers.

It’s easy to understand why. The 15 minutes spent bickering over the color of a button will be far more likely to leave an impression and remembered vs the 90 mins spent on ordinary, necessary and useful discussions in the same meeting.

One of the big differences between a startup and a big company is that big companies have to make decisions about what to build. For a smaller company that decisions is already made. It’s the reason for the existence of the smaller company.

And the cost of making the wrong decision can be extremely high and it can be hard to both identify that it is the wrong decision and to reverse it.

With smaller companies if they make the wrong decision they will simply cease to exist, but in a larger company some other product (the one that made the company large in the first place) will cover for it.

This isn’t to excuse inefficient practices, but the idea that 100% efficiency (as defined by coding 100% of the time) or even a very high coding throughput is an unmitigated good is not really valid.

And yet all the research showed that people were working longer during the pandemic for the same outcomes.

Output didn’t drop but productivity did.

Any examples?

Every other way is better.

1) Crypto is easily traceable. Far more than any other means of funds transfer if you exercise even modest efforts to hide the source of funds. And to the extent crypto provides a modicum of privacy it’s because it’s too small for governments to have put any restrictions on it.

2) There is absolutely no guarantee the money will reach Wikileaks. At best, the money will reach the holder of Wikileaks’s private key holder. As we found out with Coinbase, for the vast majority of crypto wallets, that’s not gonna be your intended recipient.

3) Even “The money” it’s a term Is debatable. If you sent them that crypto 1 month ago and they tried to withdraw it today, at best they would have got half the value you sent them.

There is nothing unique about crypto in terms of privacy other than the fact that most governments haven’t bothered with it. In fact, crypto is so easily traceable I’ve always harbored half a theory that it was created by the CIA specifically to chart out and bust drug and terrorist rings.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the only reason the government isn’t taking down/regulating crypto is because the intelligence agencies are just so thrilled with the awesome network information they’re getting about criminals through their crypto transfers.

Nothing is crypto’s fault.

We get it.

It’s not cryptos fault that it’s a terrible currency. Just invest in it. It’s not crypto’s fault that it’s a terrible investment. Why don’t you want a great currency that government doesn’t control? It’s not crypto’s fault that half the money in the ecosystem is stolen. Why isn’t the government helping this anti governmental technology? It’s not crypto’s fault that the vast majority of the coins are scams. It only failed because Citadel and Blackstone attacked it.

No, crypto is pure and faultless. And anything that it does wrong is the fault of the government and/or Blackstone and Citadel and/or the Paper Hands.

Lol at complaining about being frothy against crypto when crypto is nothing other than HODL Diamond hands cultists (I say cultists to be nice and not call them grifters and scam artists).