Pretty sure this guy got my mother. I remember her describing exactly this trying to get her computer fixed. I had to explain to her it was a scam, help her replace all her credit cards and wipe her machine to factory since computer was compromised with remote access. It was a huge headache, this guy deserves jail.
Their use of the word significantly in this context does not refer to statistical significance. The percentages you are referring too are just basic metrics based on the last years data, not something that was t-tested. The longer time period changes the starting index, it doesn't really make this type of analysis more or or less statistically significant. As the author alluded, this could mean that economic mechanisms close this gap over time when it appears, or it could be a recent effect. Your criticism isn't really valid.
This is crazy, people actually believed chatbots were going to catch on? My employer developed chat bots, but only so we could grab the associated PR from a few press releases to ride the hype. We knew no one was going to use them.
Simply put, a union just refers to the formation of a formal group of employees for the purpose of collective bargaining. I.e., the workers feel like individually their attempts to negotiate are not working so they get together to discuss rules, compensation, safety conditions, whatever as a group.
The questions you are asking likely have different answers for every union out there. The pros are collective bargaining. The cons are variable.
I have hypothesized that long-term, crypto currency will be made illegal to some degree eventually for one of two reasons or both:
1. Governments use fiat currency as a lever for it's monetary policy and cool/heat the economy and job market. If crypto use becomes widespread enough to weaken this lever, I could see pushback from governments.
2. This, environmental concerns. Crypto has to be the least-green modern technology by ALOT. Once the public catches on, I think there will be significant push back. This is of course largely dependent on the population deciding to side with the environment, which history has shown us has to be a mixed bag.
If you are making $36,000 per year, you are not making minimum wage. People that make around this much, their salary doesn't vary drastically like a software engineer's does city to city.
City-based salary adjustments are really something only educated professionals get, low-wage earners are screwed in big cities. I think also it will shock you how much every day items are compared to Europe. For one, public transportation is not available to most of America. So you have to have a car and car insurance, thats hundreds of dollars more per month right there. Cellphone service costs 3x as much as anywhere in Europe. And yes, the housing is absurd as a percentage of wages compare the the EU. Health insurance is really expensive as well; the employee's contribution to a company sponsored health plan is often as much as 20% of a minimum wage workers wage.
You bandage wounds to keep out bacteria, and it is your skin having to fight off less infections that make it heal faster. Consider that Neosporin,aka generic triple antibiotic ointment, does increase the speed of external wound healing. It does this because of its antibiotic properties. Nothing to do with moisture far as I know, where did you get that notion?
Robinhood makes money on it's "gold" service, which is $10/month. For that $10 they float you the cash to immediately reinvest cash after stock sales (rather than waiting 3 days) and they give you $2000 in margin. Really it's pretty genius. They figured out that transaction costs for exchanges are essentially free. With their gold service they are monetizing at least 6% profit margin, i.e. you can think of the $120 yearly as a cost of borrowing $2000, which would boil down to 6% interest rate. Since that money is secured by assets in your account, this is actually a really attractive rate for the risk profile, and, likely scenario, few people are constantly maxed out at $2000. So membership / margin lent is their total profit margin. I bet its well over 10%. Not bad.
I've actually modeled email domain as a feature in a regression model of customer spending habits. We were all surprised to find it is a very predictive signal!
Of course insurance companies want to use every signal available to them to price discriminate on rates. If you are a good driver, the insurance company wants you because you are unlikely to file claims. Likewise, you are happy to receive a discount for being a good driver. A simple signal of being a good driver is your driving record, but we all know this isn't very reliable by itself. So you end up with other signals being used. Literally any signal that is not protected (like race/gender) will get used in any insurance model. None of this is new. The color of your car is used surely, so why is it so shocking that your email domain is used as well?
As part of my senior thesis years ago, I did an econometric model/analysis that sought to explain inequality as proxied by difference between mean wages of the bottom 90% of earners vs the top 10%. Times where the amount of estate tax collected per capita was highest highly correlated with the lowest periods of inequality by this measure. Trashing the concept of estate tax on the premise that it is hard to enforce is a bad idea, we should focus our energy on how to better implement it.
They were not hired to handle their campaign banking, that was a side deal made with a hastily written contract because the founders failed to put time into setting up the necessary accounts. This is the start-up version of going to a check cashing service. We all cut corners trying to push our product out the door but I do think keeping the books in-house and having your own bank account is pretty sound advice, not victim blaming.
I find it absolutely amazing that they would let someone else handle the money that represents the life of their business. Hard to feel sorry for them. No doubt the correct thing to do would have been to delay the campaign until the banking issues were resolved. This was an amateur mistake. Yea it would be nice if we lived in a world where we could be naive and let strangers handle our money without fear but we all know thats just not the case and not prudent even if it was. I don't feel sorry for this project, lesson learned they won't make the same mistake again.
Data Scientist at major company here that was pounding nails in construction circa 2005. This to me is no surprise. At the time I was early 20s and needed that job that would be sort of an apprenticeship. The problem was, these jobs just didn't exist. The young guys (me) got laid of every winter to keep on as many senior crew members as possible and every spring the jobs were less skilled and more labor (think demolition vs. the skills needed for finish work). Young workers need a solid 5-7 years to develop those skills, but from the years 2005 (yea, that early things started slowing down in construction) to 2015 we didn't really train anyone new. My story was a common one; unable to find work in the trades, I eventually gave up and looked for work elsewhere. So there is a gap in the training of skilled labor. How long will it take to recover? Easy, the same 5-10 years we took a break from training new labor.
What you're failing to consider is that this 1.67% of revenue is more like 10-15% of their volume, and that in small package scale is everything. That extra volume lets the carrier load more full trucks direct to smaller destinations, which decreases handling costs (unload, sort, reload). This is why small package carriers give such large discounts to big accounts. The top line decrease would be small, yes, but losing the volume would INCREASE operational costs.
This is clearly going after services like shapeshift.io. If you are unaware, shapeshift lets you transact between various cryptocurrencies on an exchange. The exchange doesn't hold record of the transactions, so you could legitimately buy BTC with a coinbase account linked to your bank account, exchange it to lite coin (or any other currency to) and have it deposited in a wallet you created anonymously, then exchange it back to BTC but to yet again an anonymously created wallet. At most it nips away a couple of percent, and now your BTC cannot be traced back to you even though you bought it with a bank account linked to your name. Its the easiest laundering that has ever existed. This bill would force shapeshift IO to maintain transaction records, game over.
Consider the scenario where I don't already hold bitcoins, but would use them for a transaction. It is very possible that by the time I obtain them, then go to make a transaction an hour later, that I could lose over 10% due to fluctuations. It's not that I physically can't, its that I would be stupid to rely on bitcoin as an exchange of value when there are other options with less volatility. Yes bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are in their infancy and inherently volatile at this stage, but the volatility until now has been lower such that we are willing to accept losing 1-2% in a transaction for the perceived value of transacting in bitcoin over a fiat currency. With volatility at these levels, that value proposition goes out the window. Adoption of a currency is always a function of how stable it is as a store of value, and wider adoption is what sustains a higher value. Speculation is not able to sustain a higher intrinsic store of value, hence my hypothesis.
Yea but none of those reasons explain the current spike, unless you think a nation is starting to build a bitcoin reserve and keeping quiet about it. That's a pretty out there theory on the spectrum of explanations for the current boom.
The general problem isn't convincing people that housing them would be more cost effective, it's that a large portion of the population is worried about incentivizing people to not work. Whether or not that is a valid concern is up for debate, but it's definitely the main driver why programs like this in the US rarely get funded.
I feel like this is going to be an increasingly hard question to answer as more and more cloud providers with interchangeable services become available. It's like buying a car. You will run into someone that has used 2 or 3 different providers of the same service, but some one with hands on experience with them all, unlikely.
Interestingly, I placed an order on amazon.com and while the order appears when I look at my account, none of the usual automated emails have come. I wonder how deeply this is effecting their retail customers.
Ugh tipping culture. Pay should be predictable and not guilted on the customer. If the predictable pay is too low people can try to find better work, but at least tension is removed from the time of transaction.
The dataset is private but the general gist is its like 100,000 rows with conversion and revenue data with time and 2 other dimensions. There are some outliers (clearly errors) in the data and strong seasonality differences in some dimensions, and data sparsity in others. The applicant isn't told about these, but we look for them to find it in their analysis and control for it in a predictive model they are asked to build based on the data.
We give a data set and ask some open ended questions. Out of 800 applicants, maybe 50 complete the exercise, and then maybe less than 10 we'll want to talk to based on what they sent. I spent maybe 5 hours on the dataset when I was interviewing for the position myself.