tomkarlo

I don't think anyone's come up with a great substitute for the decades of organic growth and iteration necessary to make a compelling city. Setting aside a deliberate corporate sponsor, how many compelling new cities really started in the last 30-40 years, even by accident? E.g. below 25K population at the start, over 250K at the end.

E.g. I looked through this list, and at least at quick glance it seems like they were all fairly major cities 100 years ago. http://www.businessinsider.com/us-news-best-places-to-live-i...

You can substitute "Bay Area" with many of the major centers in the US at this point - Seattle, LA, Denver, Austin all have the same issues, they're just a few years behind the Bay. We need fixes to zoning and development rules and tax laws, they help cities be more liveable as it will help everyone. Cities overseas have figured this out, to some degree - rent as a % of income is lower in both Europe and Asia, generally, and it's a lot easier to build effective mass transit when housing densities are a bit higher. The single family home is one of the worst things to happen to the US, and it's slowly killing us with traffic and spiraling housing prices.

The history of corporate funded cities (or even government planned ones) is not good. It takes far too long to generate a real community / cultural center vs. the time spans corporations want to work in. Also, the city governments would be highly inclined to align with the interests of the companies, not the residents, which is not a recipe for a fun place to live.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordl%C3%A2ndia

If you're already accruing the supposed negatives of being associated with the industry (and I emphasize supposed, given that tech is also the region's biggest economic driver these days), you might as well have the dollars too. Tech companies are struggling to hire people in the Bay because of the housing crisis, it's entirely rational that they would start supporting efforts to fix the problem. At least in this case corporate interests are mostly aligned with public interests.

Lol, no. It's higher than that because 70% of screener interviews end up not resulting in a hire, and probably 50-70% of on-sites don't. I think the last estimate I saw was about 50 hrs of interviewing total per hired candidate, and that feels about right to me.

7 interviews just for the hired candidate (1-2 screeners, 5-6 on-site pool interviews.) Maybe less than 7 hrs if they're cut to 45 mins each.

I've done 150+ interviews for Google.

A single candidate will do 1-2 screens (this changes over time / role), plus at least 4-5 on-site interviews. That's about 7-8 hours of meetings, minimum. Having interviewed at a number of other SF tech startups, almost all of them had about the same # of interviews.

Once you're past the screen interview, you'll almost always get all 5 interviews in the pool unless you're terrible - it's more efficient to just have the candidate come in once.

Google recommends a 1:1 ratio of prep/feedback time to interview time, so it's ~2 hrs per interview even if you're not involved in the hire / no hire discussion.

The discussion here was specifically that it was likely that background checks would start disqualifying candidates, so maybe it's better to do them up front as that's cheaper than having the interviews done first... I'd say that still makes sense, at least before the pool, if you think there's a reasonable chance they'll get punted.

Sorry, are you talking about the US or another country?

We have elements of common law in the US code, and you can definitely have binding precedent that doesn't involve the Supreme Court. As for most folks not having any contact with lawyers... I'm not sure I've met any adult who hasn't.

California's constitution alone is over 100 pages, never mind thousands of pages of other legal code as well as precedents. It's not that the laws are so complex, it's that they have to cover so much it's never going to be feasible for someone not doing it professionally to be an expert on it.

Folks say "you should consult with a lawyer" when the topic is something that's too obscure or marginal to be obvious to a non-lawyer... that doesn't mean the laws are overly complex, just that there are always going to be marginal situations.

How much does an outsourced background check? Running an interview pool on someone using a bunch of skilled employees costs probably $4K or so. Figure 7 interviews, 3 hrs each (prep, interview, feedback, hiring meeting) plus someone to arrange the onsite. If those are $150K employees, the fully-loaded cost of 20 hrs of work is going to be over $4K.

It depends how you group the age cohorts, but my recollection is that the second oldest cohort (something like 65-75) actually has one of the lowest accident rates, and the oldest one has a higher accident rate per mile but tend to drive fewer miles total (in particular, because they're not commuting to work.) So the benefits of taking away licenses from the elderly might be fairly limited compared to say, more strict testing for teenagers and tighter DUI rules.

Also, a good point someone was made is that it may be easier for technology to solve the problems of elderly drivers who still have good cognition. E.g. you can make up for their limited neck flexibility with blind spot radar and backup cameras, and poor reaction times with collision detection systems. It's harder to do that for a teen who wants to drive too fast or make aggressive lane changes.

Or, you could just get paid more to accept emails outside of normal working hours. Pager duty bonus / overtime, of some form.

The current problem is that companies are classifying employees as "exempt" which means they are not compensated for work outside of normal hours, but they are then expending folks to respond from mobile at all hours. Those two things are inherently in conflict.

I believe there's some requirements in Europe around this - companies need to be able to turn off access to corp email outside of work hours, to enforce that they're not incurring work. Is it France that does this? It's also why there's a quick settings toggle in Android to turn your managed corp profile on and off - there's an API that lets the MDM do it, so they provide similar functionality for the user.

Yes, but she did so in part by using fraud and deception. When you're an early stage company trying to raise money from investors there's a large component of "trust us to do the right things with your money" that is going to be hard to sell investors with her on the board.

Picking up things without the boxes allowed them to use bike messengers and/or foot messengers rather than vans, which is a lot more efficient in urban areas (no traffic issues, parking problems, etc.) They'd just put whatever you gave them into a bag and then into their messenger bag. Then they'd hand off to a truck located at a central location that served multiple messengers.

I used them a few times, it was pretty cool and if you didn't have the box for something could save a bunch of time. Unfortunately I think most consumers don't ship things often enough (aside from returns where you already have a box and a label) to be worthwhile serving this way. Small businesses were better but many of them already get discounted rates from UPS if they ship a lot.

Loosely speaking, it was - he was using the supposed gains of earlier investors to attract new investment, then using those new funds to pay off the earlier investors. It was spread across multiple investments rather than just one vehicle, but that seems kind of irrelevant.

"Prosecutors were focused on Shkreli’s leadership of two hedge funds, MSMB Capital and MSMB Healthcare, and a pharmaceutical company, Retrophin. Shkreli raised millions for MSMB Capital, but not as much as he told investors. When he made a bad bet that doomed the hedge fund, he launched a scheme to cover it up, prosecutors said. He raised more money for another hedge fund, MSMB Heathcare, which he largely used to fund the start up of Retrophin.

When disgruntled investors attempted to claim their profits, Shkreli used money from other investors and Retrophin cash and stock to pay them off, according to prosecutors." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2017/08/04/m...

It's irrelevant if it's "bad". It's illegal, which means that at least in theory, law enforcement is supposed to pursue and prosecute it, since their mandate is to enforce the laws as passed by the legislative body, etc.

I'd argue this isn't inconsistent; these states are so small they effectively have ceded control of their economy, as well as their national defense, to the larger European community. Kosovo and Montenegro, for example, previously used the German Mark. This seems pretty close to an admission that for whatever reason (scale, stability) they're not able to issue their own currency in a credible manner.

Once a device is certified, a manufacturer can keep selling it indefinitely, I believe... and/or those may not be actually Google certified devices. (Especially with very low end / no-name handsets.) When I referred to "shipping" devices, I meant new devices coming to market.

There's a predefined window for when a device can be certified for release with a particular Android OS version. I don't know what the current window is, but devices that are shipping now (Q1) likely got certified some time last year in Q3 or Q4, well within the window for N.

It's significantly harder to enforce things like update requirements after a phone ships - for one thing, it's not entirely up to the OEM in many cases, it also depends on getting carriers to certify the upgrade.

You specifically said "That's easier to parse than odds for .. a blackjack hand?" Presumably what one is parsing when making a speculative trade is the odds of a positive outcome.

(You don't need to parse a blackjack hand, btw. The odds are pre-calculated and easy to look up[0]. But I was talking about the overall odds of playing, anyway, which is usually about a 0.5% house advantage per hand.)

Note: I'm not arguing that casino odds are better or worse than the odds of a crypto trade. Just that they're better defined, which you seem to agree with me on.

[0] http://www.blackjackage.com/odds-hand.php

See my other comment, but TLDR it's not a foreign currency if you're a Eurozone country.

Yes, but that's very different - the Eurozone countries are not allowing another nation's currency to become their defacto currency, they're creating a pooled economy where they all still have a voice in the management of the common currency. (And it's still causing a ton of problems, when you consider what's happened in Spain, Italy and Greece.)

It's radically different from allowing your defacto currency to be one managed by another country, particuarly one that has no common economic interest with yours.

When you say "many", how many do you think, and what are you basing that number on? I'm not sure the total wealth from bitcoin to Americans is material to the national economy, much less the potential negative change in that wealth.

The stats I've seen indicate that essentially nobody owns bitcoin when you compare it to other commonly forms of wealth, like homes or traditional equities.

I think one estimate was that less than 500K people - worldwide - own more than one bitcoin, approximately worth $10K. Compare that to the US housing market, where there's 100M-odd homeowners with an average value of ~$220K. Let's say there's 200K bitcoin holders in the US with a bitcoin each, so that's ~2 billion dollars in value vs say 22 trillion in home assets, very rough calc. (And yes, some of those have a lot more than one bitcoin, but some houses are worth more than $220K, and the wealth effect tends to happen breadthwise, primarily.)

It's not clear that the number of people holding Bitcoin gains, multiplied by the wealth effect, is creating any significant impact on the global economy. Similarly, even if everyone who used credit cards to buy Bitcoin went bankrupt, that still wouldn't be that big a deal for the economy.

Right now Bitcoin lacks the kind of leverage and interconnection with other asset classes that made the real estate crash have a big impact. In that situation, for example, you had banks running 30:1 leverage on some assets, which mean that a 4% decline resulted in a total loss of equity.

When they allow a foreign currency to become the de-facto medium of exchange in a nation, the government is basically admitting that it's lost the ability to issue currency and manage its own economy. The loss of economic control involved is so extreme that you'd only do it if you had essentially no other options left - the government is close to failure.

1) Here's the lottery code for CA. Payouts are regulated - by it's nature, the odds of a lottery depend on the number of tickets, but typically, there are strict rules about the minimum % of receipts paid back to winners (which is effectively equivalent to setting house odds), and in many cases, only the state government can run them. http://static.www.calottery.com/~/media/Publications/Lottery...

2.) There's been multiple cases where lotteries were -accidentally- setup such that the odds were in the favor of players if they pursued the right strategy. Here's one: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/how-mit...

A history of gains to investors aren't an definite indicatio that an investment is good, or that the overall odds favor the investor. If I go into a casino and win roulette 3 times in a row, that doesn't mean the wheel is biased in my favor. Similarly, in most ponzi schemes, all of the early investors make money.

(And even in a non-fraudulent situation, simply having an investment go up doesn't mean it was a good investment, when examined on a risk-adjusted basis vs. other alternate options.)

Consider the contrast between the two things you just said:

* "place bets on which cryptocoins might be more useful than other" * "The Casino ALWAYS wins, in aggregate."

In the former, you expect you have some better than even odds of winning money -- otherwise you wouldn't be doing it. In the latter you clearly understand that the odds are against you. See how different those are?

We can argue about the ability to day-trade the cryptocurrency market, but it's hard to argue that the odds there are more clearly defined than in a casino. The reason there's a moving market is because we don't all agree on those odds.

> Okay, fine, so then regulate the 'telling' part and not the 'playing' part

They do regulate the telling part, quite tightly. But it's extremely difficult to control what people may tell each other outside the bounds of an issuance document. E.g. the SEC can't control what folks in r/bitcoin might be out there telling people as reasons to buy this Index fund.

Generally any compliant securities issuance will have something to this effect - the "Risk Factors" section. The problem is it's often drowned out the broader hype of an offering, or a seller will say "they make us say that, don't worry about it."

Unscrupulous issuers have historically targeted less-sophisticated buyers who are less likely to be experienced investors - and also less likely to retain their own counsel to review an offering. Hence the accredited req.

That's to make it difficult for a player to calculate the odds of a particular hand. The odds of the overall game are still pre-defined and regulated.

Casinos can't/won't promise that you'll make money by playing their games. Securities are generally purchased with the expectation that you'll make money, and are marketed up to the allowable line of suggesting they are good ways to make money.

Allowing people to play a game where the odds are openly against them, vs. buying a security where they're being told the odds favor them but it may be otherwise, are very different propositions when you're asking if they're "fraud".

At least at Google I don't think that was their original intent - the idea was to provide a way for employees to express their gratitude away from the perf context.

I don't think they should be used for perf as they are not intended to be objective feedback.