Personal experience: My company had record profits due to cost cutting in 2020, yet my department’s budget was frozen at the beginning of the pandemic and remains frozen. Two team members quit briefly before the pandemic and were never backfilled due to the budget freeze, no promotions or raises have been given (or will be given until at least the upcoming summer or fall, I’m told - though this flies in the face of what I’m seeing in other departments), and the workload for my team has increased drastically. I’m a middle manager with no real control over promotions/raises/etc. and it has been sad to see previously chipper and excited employees descend into obvious misery.
“ The senior official told Reuters, however, that the plan is to ban private crypto-assets while promoting blockchain - a secure database technology that is the backbone for virtual currencies but also a system that experts say could revolutionise international transactions.”
Flashback to a couple years ago when “blockchain experts” proliferated to attempt to apply the technology to seemingly every domain, benefit or no.
Bitcoin still doesn’t provide any significant value
outside of black market purchases, though.
The increase in value is due to an increase in hype and a lot of people hoping to get rich quick - not due to increased practical adoption.
Governments aren’t going to let it replace currencies they can control - and to be honest, I’m not sure we’d want it to - somebody’s always in control, and I’d argue it’s better to at least know who they are (see any HN comments on “flat” organizations). It’s just a bunch of wasted energy to arbitrarily move money from one set of traders to another.
Just another instance of VCs pumping money into a bad but appealing idea and propping it up indefinitely at the expense of society at large. This kind of investment really needs to be more closely regulated - the businesses never even have to be successful for the investors to profit as long as they go public in time to leave retail investors holding the bag before the crash.
Surprised by the majority of comments here. How many of you have actually looked at these pictures? A private entity decided to stop publishing certain things. Another private entity is declining to sell old copies of said things. This is not “cancel culture” like conservative commentators want to make it out to be - and I think the publisher and now eBay are making the right call - children are impressionable, and presenting racial caricatures like these to them is not good.
Starting a company has the potential to create something of value for people outside the company, though. Buying some Bitcoin and it increasing in value doesn’t really change anything in the world but the amount of money the person who bought it has. It’s not like Bitcoin use is very widespread or likely ever will be due to its slowness, power inefficiency, and government distaste. Bitcoin goes up in value mostly because more people think they’ll earn money from buying it and it subsequently increasing in value, not because it has become more useful.
McKinsey is in the business of convincing governments and other entities into parting with massive sums of cash for relatively simple research and recommendations. They get by mostly on the appearance of prestige rather than any legitimate value add, thus their focus on hiring based on school prestige.
I’m not so sure that video games are the “most important” aspect of youth culture. Within certain groups, yeah, but that has been true to an extent for decades. AAA video games still skew to largely male audiences, and people don’t build their identities as much around casual games. Social media and music as a whole have more traction across cultural groups. If the argument is economic, then I guess Starbucks is equally important to human culture as recorded music is.
Switch which sides of the bed you sleep on. Get more involved in each other’s individual pursuits and hobbies. Buy tiny canvases and paint together. Call friends and family you haven’t talked to for a while.
This led me down a Wikipedia hole where I learned about John B. Calhoun’s experiments with mice - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Calhoun#Mouse_experi...
Very interesting - once the “mouse universe” reached a high population density, it descended into violence and chaos, which was succeeded by massive behavioral changes across the entire population - male mice became introverted, ceased fighting and attempting to reproduce, and simply ate, drank, slept and groomed themselves until the population collapsed.
That claim by Jeff Dean has been more or less debunked. The real reason that Google demanded the paper not be published is that it is critical of models underlying the company’s fundamental business - the whole message from Jeff Dean is very misleading and states a bunch of other, unrelated things as the “real reason”.
Polling has issues, but it's an extreme exaggeration to say that it's dead and that any statement based on it is fictional. Anecdotally, very few people I know are comfortable with the state of personalized ads. The kind of people who are too paranoid to answer polls are probably not fans of personalized ads either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the real percentage of those who disapprove is higher than the polls in the article show.
76% of incorporated places in the US have a population of less than 5000. I’m not sure a 50k+ place can be referred to accurately as a small town - where I’m from, cities with populations that large have managed to maintain their local papers anyway, unlike the smaller towns.
This seems like a profoundly irresponsible move. After selling expensive snake oil FSD hardware for years, Tesla is putting a flawed system into production that people will trust too much and which will inevitably lead to accidents. This could lead to legislation against FSD and set the whole industry back, preventing more responsible players from bringing their superior products to market in a timely fashion. Maybe a conscious play from Tesla to handicap their more technologically developed rivals?
America and American capitalists benefit from America’s position, so I can’t imagine American isolation going much further. The US controls many of the world’s major supply chains and trade routes and ensures them with its military. What country can offer realistic competition for a reserve currency? China is trusted even less than America in many parts of the world, and their governance is even more opaque.
Half the population will still destroy the planet in half the time. Businesses, governments, and individual people (especially in the Western world) need to coordinate on consuming less energy and focus on sustainability.
That was my point of view when I considered myself a libertarian. If you actually give the stuff a chance and read it - it’s just facts, often untold and unknown. It did shift my views far to the left, but the only thing holding me back from that was ignorance of the truth.
That GM entered into a highly valuable partnership with this transparently fraudulent company doesn’t inspire confidence about their future.
Milton’s last company was accused of not delivering on deal terms, and it seems as though that company BSed their way to an acquisition. Before that, he was involved in random low-tech businesses - at least one of which he seemingly lied to a partner about his profit off of.
The company’s name is so unoriginal that I wonder how anyone can take them seriously. It’s like an off-brand Tesla - just riding the association to trick people into parting with their money?
This argument boils down to
1. It’s difficult to prioritize multiple things (the environment and public interest are mentioned as examples), so why bother?
2. Prioritizing profit has worked so far
Regarding 2 - strictly from the lens of shareholder value, yes, but in terms of environmental impact and public interest, no, it hasn’t. Most corporate profit and presumed value to society has completely ignored negative externalities imposed on the public and on the environment. Our society is increasingly unequal and rigid, and climate change Is already having an impact. When corporate actions result in the eventual loss of cities, environments and lives to flooding - these things are important, and the corporations and their shareholders socialize the costs out to everybody while retaining the bulk of the benefits and profits for themselves.
The author does a shockingly bad job of defending the current corporate ethos and the fact that increased stock value and corporate profits are many times at the expense of society and the environment.
Uber and Lyft’s sole “innovation” is in driving down the value of driving by reclassifying drivers as contractors and not having to pay benefits while the drivers barely earn more than they spend to keep working, so I don’t think they’re going to give in easily. It’s a shame the initial investors already got away with IPOs and foisting the consequences off onto general investors before the underlying business models collapse.