throwaway9980

Ugh... paywalled. It seems like the frequency has increased for tapping a link and smacking one’s forehead on a paywall. It would be nice if there was a warning flag on the headline.

It takes one to know one?

Could you explain this in a bit more detail? Are you suggesting that there are powerful stakeholders who gain greater power outside the company through the success of the company?

I think the most underappreciated story of the last year is the humbling of Jack Ma and Alibaba by the CCP. Imagine the same thing happening to Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or heck even Mark Cuban.

It’s not all Gen Z. I have heard from several friends who are older Gen X guys that they’ve done cash out refinancing to dump money into the stock market. The reasoning is that they’d be idiots not to borrow at 2.5% and put it into stocks. Hard to argue with when the US stock market has a 100 year track record of producing 7% on average.

A couple weeks after hearing about this from one guy, his wife tells me that he made $80k on AMC today. It’s gone up another 3-4x from that day. No idea if he’s still in or not, but this kind of thing feels like the end of days of bubbles. It won’t end well.

Nike has a market capitalization of over $200B. I’d guess if they could do away with human labor for $500M they would just do it. Cut labor costs and eliminate their sweatshop labor practice PR problems in one fell swoosh.

Yes, I agree that we can all do better, be better, strive for good things for all, etc, but this language borders on religious. And it’s everywhere these days. It’s as if not always living up to a set of ideals is the modern original sin that requires constant atonement.

Something like 0.000000001% of the process.

This sounds like the kind of equality that communism created in the 20th century. The sort where all but a few are miserable and impoverished.

Of course, that’s most of human history. Until very recently life was nasty, brutish, and short. We seem to be trying our best to revert to that condition.

The bad actors with the most incentive to keep the bugs in place are the same people that put the bugs into the system: lawmakers. They might occasionally close a bug, but they are not interested in preventing them being introduced. They sell these bugs/vulnerabilities. That's the business they are in.

This anxiety about being able to join the club is the key to keeping the 99% imprisoned. We are all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

I recall Bezos making some public statements a couple years ago pushing back on internal objections to working with DoD. Something to the effect of “I understand the concern, but if you think the US doesn’t need a strong military, you’re mistaken, and if you think the US is generally a bad actor, you’re mistaken.”

In this context sight has a couple of meanings. The first is like the sighting of land from a ship. The sight of the house is a glimpse of it. The second is simply the condition of the house.

I might tell my kids, “I can’t stand the sight of your room right now.” Which means I am upset by viewing the condition of their messy room.

The Internet also enables bad actors to participate anonymously. Obviously plenty of the people screaming on the Internet are “real” people. But how many are paid to manipulate and agitate? What percentage of inflammatory posts on both sides of the divide are the product of paid influence?

It sounds like conspiracy theory lala land, but I knew people 10+ years ago who were writing reviews and engaging in product discussions professionally. It’s only gotten more sophisticated and widespread. It feels like today we’re living in a political landscape akin to fake review bullshit land on Amazon.

"they're clearly profiting"

This is the purpose of for profit corporations.

I don’t think you’re going to be able to secure the blockchain without those governments and militaries. Maybe you replace the massive banking industry with a new massive crypto financial industry?

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

I think this is also the explanation for American success in the 20th century. The United States as we know it is, like all empires, built on the spoils of war. The United States was able to capture the best and brightest scientists. These people were brought into a system whose structure and demands were dictated by the needs of a growing government and military. This is the fuel that drove American exceptionalism.

I don’t always want my wants either. The point is that needs usually produce greater motivation. The alcoholic who really wants that drink describes it as a need and works to satisfy it as if it is.

Needs are wants with greater urgency. Demand is ensured by the ongoing widespread death associated with the virus. Government should stand ready to pay a large price to ensure supply and provide subsidy for those with less means. Regulation, in this case, introduces inefficiency. Inefficiency, in this case, costs lives.

Yes. See the sibling comment about Merkle trees.

I think these topics are deeper than that, but the way they are presented and discussed in modern society is shallow. The arguments are caricatures and merely tactics in a game of argumentation. They are not good faith discussions about important subjects.

Pretty sure there was some personal interest at play. She was married to Sergey Brin. His mother has/had Parkinson’s and I believe I read that based on genetics he almost certainly will also. 23andMe is a data play original conceived, in part, to gather genetic data to further research to extend the life of a billionaire.

Here’s hoping we all benefit from this work. It’s easy to spin things as sinister if that’s what you want to do.

I’m starting to feel like this perfect or nothing attitude is a massive amplifier of the problems we’re facing.

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

We’re way out of balance. Lot’s of courage, less wisdom, no serenity.

Pardon me for being old and married for decades, but what in the world are you talking about? There’s always somebody for somebody.

Unless we’re talking about polygamy or China’s one child policy. Those definitely create a lot of single men with no hope.

Not sure how the article is using the terms because it’s paywalled.

Generally “conservative” means maintaining the status quo. You could see how “progressive” might be the opposite if that. It’s interesting when you apply the older “liberal” label which would mean generally permissive. Obviously that label makes no sense whatsoever when describing San Francisco. In this case it sounds like they are describing entrenched interests as conservative because they want to conserve the current state of affairs. They are opposed to progress. Therefore the people opposite them must be progressive.

This is such a spot on comment. I think the trouble is that you can’t pick the way that opposition to very bad things finds it’s moment. We have had decades of horrible abuses and creeping police state totalitarianism. It affects everyone. It permeates life everywhere. I wish the current zeitgeist around changing that was less identitarian, but I will take what I can get and happily support it.

YouTube. Honestly it’s pretty scary how perfectly they tailor the echo chamber to fit me.

You don’t think it happens with books? My dad has a house full of books. He isn’t a talk radio guy and doesn’t do the Facebook that the kids are into these days.

Instead if you look closely at his library you will find plenty of titles by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Michael Savage, Bill Bennett, and on and on. It’s a small percentage of what he reads, but it’s how he gets his ideology and has been for 20+ years.

The grace to be wrong has been increasing replaced by some sort of fight or flight response to being challenged. It’s not wrong to say that there are life and death consequences w/r/t to the important issues. That said, the increasingly emotional response to that is detrimental to discourse. The more hysterical people become advocating their point of view, the more difficult it is to hear their arguments. When someone is extremely emotional it triggers a natural skepticism. Not because we think they are wrong per se, rather because we know that when we are emotionally distressed it is more difficult to be rational.

Basically: everyone needs to calm down.

You're right, they aren't the first. That said, when I use accounting software, it's pretty obvious to me that I am going to be sharing my transaction history with the accounting software. When I connect my bank account to Venmo, it is absolutely not obvious to me that I'm sharing my entire transaction history with Plaid. Replicating the appearance of my bank's login screens is critical to the illusion.

Even if I did understand that they are storing and using my credentials, I should be able to expect from a reputable business that they are not scraping irrelevant transaction data and then using it for purposes that don't explicitly support the app I am using. Selling my transaction history definitely isn't supporting the use case I'm authorizing.