will_brown

Well not to rock the boat or beat a dead horse here, but it would appear my down voting/flagging privileges have been removed since this post, could they be reinstated?

>The public markets are generally very unforgiving. This is why so many tech companies are choosing to stay private longer.

Can you even explain what that means?

In my estimation the companies are staying private longer so the VCs can blow up the valuations pre IPO higher than anytime in history, whereas, if the startup IPO’d from the start there is no way to continue the growth while sustaining the loss (in the real world business have to make a profit to continue) and VCs couldn’t make the same profit they do now, but in all other respects the risk would be the same.

Anyway it wouldn’t be to hard to look at the IPO of VC backed tech startups and determine what % had profits vs operating losses (obviously my guess is the majority are IPOing at losses). Then, a further analysis could be done to see if the average startup company valuations/market caps declined post IPO and how much pre IPO investors/shareholders took off the table.

Edit: looks like since 2010 there have been 100+ tech unicorns ($1B+ valuation) and ~2/3 didn’t make profit. Wish I could readily calculate how much VCs made taking those companies public, maybe someone can link an article/data.

>There is no way where Bird becomes a viable business that grows into its absurd valuation.

I was recently chided and reproached by the HN mods for knocking scooter companies (even got the old “this isn’t personal, but don’t...”).

the point is with any SV funded company you don’t need revenue or even to be a viable business. You just need SV money (I think Bird has already burned through $415M and now asking for this $300M) to launch the business and “grow” the user base and/or metrics(someone here once fittingly described the model as selling $5 bills for $1).

So now you raise $500M sell $5 bills for $1, the startup staggers their sales so they show constant growth month over month, in reality you raise additional rounds to get more VCs to buy in and help market the company, then finally when you show tremendous growth (metrics), show revenue of $100M, then you file for a IPO and explain away the losses of $400M by saying at any point you can “flip the switch” and cut costs by no longer reinvesting in growth but make profits. Then at IPO you cash out and dump the shit company that’s never made a dollar on the public because all they see is the media pushed by SV/VCs with the media contacts, the big SV investor names, 100% growth month over month metrics, and the hope they to will get rich.

>From a computer science perspective, what should Google do to train its models in a privacy conscious way?

Install these devices in the homes of google employees, executives and offices and allow the public to listen in. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander and all.

Maybe when google has trained the systems enough to not need to train them by collecting and listening to customers conversations, then they enter them into the stream of commerce.

Because the US doesn’t care about helping people who would take public transportation...instead we prefer VCs funneling money into innovative startups disrupting transportation by littering scooters all over our public walkways and allowing them to eventually take these companies public for billions in return.

God forbid you have an opinion other than US transportation is the best, US healthcare is the best, US education is the best...you can’t even look at other countries models or actual global rankings showing the US outspends every other country in those area yet our outcomes are nowhere near the top.

>Contrast this with acquiring a business name through any Department of State/Division of Corporations.

What do you mean by this?

Generally if a corporate name is registered (example: ABC, INC.) most states will not allow another “ABC” to be registered (even if ending in another suffix like “Corp” or even if another type of entity like an LLC).

I had a client in a certain state who registered their entity name as MSG HOLDINGS and wouldn’t you know I got a call from General Counsel of Madison Square Garden one day making an offer to purchase my clients entity solely for the name.

Here is a suggestion for the strike as well...launch a decentralized anti-libra coin.

I thought about that, and it’s just spit balling something off the cuff, but address to address self-spending may have positive impacts on the network vis-a-vis additional transaction fees for miners.

Maybe Satoshi should have built in such a feature into bitcoin (you don’t use it you lose it). That would have been a much more interesting dynamic (maybe) insofar as the original concept of P2P cash which morphed into digital gold/store of value (ie no incentive to spend, create a market/economy).

And of course Schlegel diagrams which are commonly used for visualizing four-dimensional polytopes.

It’s been over 100 years (very close in time to the publication of flatland) and I don’t think anyone has proposed an alternative diagram of a 4 cube/hypercube/Tesseract.

As I mention to a number of other comments...it simply depends on the accounting method.

It can be waived (not treated as income at all as you say) or it can be treated as income (taxes paid) and the loss carried forward for future deduction.

Sorry I meant “accrual method of accounting” auto corrected to “actual”...looks like you caught my gist.

That’s exactly how it’s done under accrued accounting. And in health care paying taxes on uncollected Billings and carrying the loses forward can make a lot of financial sense.

That’s insurance based healthcare in a nutshell. Insurance doesn’t negotiate just rates but the actual reimbursements.

The real fraud is the fact that insurance companies have been buying up health care practices/hospital systems and dropping all other providers from their networks and forcing the patients to go to the insurance owned providers (often times unbeknownst to the patients). Although there have been a couple successful large class actions by both doctors (who got dropped) and patients as well, but this hasn’t changed anything in practice just provided a little hush money.

>The best thing for the doctor is to get paid (and pay taxes on) $400.

No...the best thing is for the doctor to not upset the insurance company and get dropped from their network and lose all their patients.

Remember the famous line if you like your insurance/doctor you can keep your insurance/doctor. Turns out the president has no control over whether insurance will outright drop doctors from their networks.

As to your point on accounting, it simply depends on the doctors/hospitals accounting practices. It’s possible there is no deduction as you say (no big deal to the doctor, they got paid their fee anyway) or they can use an actual method of accounting and carry the loss forward.

>People complain about 20U$S copays on doctor visits that bill 400U$S to insurance.

Well if that’s the case...it’s because the $400 bill isn’t the real cost for the service and insurance actually pays $0 of the bilked $400.

What happens is the patient pays $20 copay gets billed ~20% of the $400, or $80...then everyone but the patient is happy, Dr. gets his $100 for the visit and gets a $300 tax deduction, the insurance gets its premiums from the patient and gets their 80% waived by the provider effectively shifting 100% of the cost to the patient while still being able to account for the 80/20 split on the books.

>I don't think these are Google's customers or users.

Think about how both yelp and TripAdvisor both built out their websites to comply with Google SEO rules (for organic search) and used Google AdWords (to pay for keyword ads to drive traffic and convert sales).

Google used their market dominance to learn everything about these markets and created competitors to both yelp and TripAdvisor. Google’s spin off companies then bid up the same adword keywords (so where yelp and TripAdvisor May have paid $1/click now google is bidding them up to $2 and these businesses can either pay or lose out to these new google businesses).

Google shouldn’t be able to use their market position to enter new markets in order to drive up costs to their existing ad customers and ultimately the end users.

>DuckDuckgo is a minor player, but microsoft's Bing isn't.

Bing has 5% market share of search.

You also don’t see Microsoft leveraging the 5% market share to create competing businesses and then self bidding on search engine keywords to bid up the costs to existing customers.

The problem is google has a dominate market share and unfairly leverage its dominate market position to the determinate of other businesses and consumers. Say I’m an airline and use google ad words and pay $2 pay per click for the term “x”, google knows I can afford to pay more, so they create a spin off company and they bid up “x” to force me to pay google more for the same AdWord or lose out to Google’s new flight aggregate business. Either way this drives up costs to consumers and is unfair to a competitive business landscape.

While the small pox/disease ridden blankets may or may not be factual, there is plenty of historical records predating Europeans landing in the Americas of using disease in warfare.

When sieging cities in antiquity water supplies would be contaminated. Arrow heads be smeared with poison and otherwise feces to cause infections. In Europe during Middle Ages corpses and feces of diseased would be catipulted into cities to cause infection, notably this this even happened with corpses that died of the bubonic plague.

Read harder? Don’t resort to ad hominem attacks because you don’t know or understand the law.

Walmart allegedly bribed foreign officials they didn’t try to bribe the “cops” for bringing the bribery charges. Although you can’t distinguish the legal difference, it doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

Executives do go to jail quite regularly for bribery and companies can and are judicially dissolved also.

For example I was in Las Vegas during the Shot Show when the FBI rolled right into the convention center and arrested executives/VPs of Smith and Wesson for bribing an undercover FBI agent, posing as a African delegate, for a large government contract.

Or how about the VW executives arrested (and convicted) for the emissions scandal?

Or the drug company Executives and CEO recently charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and defraud the US?

>Compare Walmart committing bribery to me attempting to bribe my way out of speeding ticket.

But that is how the ticket industry works...you get the ticket, hire a lawyer, the lawyer “negotiates” a deal to plead no contest in exchange for no points and a lower $ penalty or at your option take traffic school ( a local private company that no doubt “bribes” its way in to those chushy exclusive county government contracts) and the court will dismiss your ticket like it never happened.

>No, you are extrapolating that based off your understanding. Improved mitochondria might...mean nothing.

No...there are numerous studies on the proven benefits of improved mitochondrial function/capacity. One of the benefits is cellular anti-aging.

So you have bitcoin, visit bitcoin only cafes, and yet you or the business cant figure out how to pay for a cup of coffee with bitcoin...

It’s hard to tell if this is a joke, trolling, manifestation of dystopia/idiocracy.

All that’s really needed now is an underlying story of how the cafe couldn’t figure out how to accept payment, but due to being “bitcoin only” they received wild media attention and became an influencer, got SV capital investment, pivoted to a freemium model just giving away their bitcoin only coffee for free, gained market share over Starbucks thanks to SV Venture capital subsidizing our coffees and then they go public and the VCs/bitcoin coffee founders make billions unloading onto the public.

I’m so sold I was going to register both bitcoincoffee.com and bitcoincafe.com, looks like some savvy founders already beat me to the punch.

I’m a runner also...depends what you mean by long distances, but I’d promote becoming fat adapted and running in ketosis.

I’ve done a full marathon with no fuel (hydration only) in ketosis, pretty awesome and much better than my glucose/gu runs...of course I’ve had some amazing long runs out of ketosis but at certain distances the fueling is a real battle and a battle I’ve lost from time to time. I don’t think there is a good answer for fueling long distances that will work for everyone it’s all about personal experimentation and adaptation.

Blood glucose would rise because youre unable to provide enough oxygen to break it down/convert it into energy (ie more unused glucose accumulates in the blood).

Lactate/Lactic acid is a byproduct of broken down glucose, but also temporarily picks up the slack in energy when the body can’t supply enough oxygen to breakdown glucose for energy requirements. Lactic acid is used in the mitochondria of cells and keeps the heart pumping during these intense phases of exercise where the oxygen/glucose can’t do the job...again as lactic acid is temporarily being used as fuel it would follow glucose builds up as the body can’t break it down fast enough and is now using an alternate fuel source.

Creatine as I understand it isn’t a fuel/energy directly, but does facilitate recycling of energy. Moreover, as ATP (energy) is produced in the mitochondria and used by the cell it is converted into ADP, but the body/muscles will use creatine to recycle ADP back into ATP. On its own though I don’t think creatine is fuel/converted into ATP at any point like glucose/ketones.

Improved mitochondria function means improved energy conversion (in other words greater ATP with less calories)...that seems pretty useful all by itself.

Improving ATP efficiency is huge... i agree with you it may not mean stronger bones and more elastic skin...but we do know aging (less elastic skin and weaker bones) is related to the bodies breakdown in ATP supply/demand/conversion.

I just don’t think you can gloss over mitochondria inprovement as no benefit...it’s literally an improvement in energy (more energy with less calories), it’s a benefit unto itself.

It is correct, just look at the definitions of the terms.

You somehow have 3 types of exercise...aerobic, anaerobic and short duration/high intensity.

There is only aerobic and anaerobic (short duration/high intensity is anaerobic - high intensity is going to result in a build op of lactic acid which in turn will cause the burnout/short duration).

Anyway aerobic means “with oxygen” and anaerobic means “without oxygen.”

More accurately diet can prevent 100% of type 2 diabetes cases, while it can be used to reverse some cases it can not reverse 100% of cases. And yes the focus on these kinds of diets is managing blood sugar levels/insulin spikes which includes sugars, carbs, starches, and alcohol.

So when you say “nearly all” that’s right...but cutting out nearly all carbs doesn’t have to be the same as low carb, or paleo/Keto, carbs can still be the main source of daily calories such as spinach, kale, romaine, Broccoli, cabbage, kimchi, sauerkraut, etc... and even higher carb foods like nuts and seeds. Those foods “are carbs” but won’t typically spike insulin and in fact many of those “carbs” will actually improve blood sugar stability/management.

There are two types of exercise aerobic and anaerobic.

Aerobic is easy exercise (walking, jogging, etc...) where the body can supply enough oxygen to oxidize glucose to convert to energy.

During Anaerobic or high intensity exercise the body can not supply enough oxygen, so a bunch of things happen including: 1.) the body begins needing to rely on lactic acid for energy instead of oxygen/glucose, and 2.) while the lactic acid is being used for energy the glucose (blood sugar) builds up (lactic acid also builds up which is why intense exercise can not be sustained for long periods).

I also began taking magnesium (a few years ago) for running, not depression.

I probably log 50-80 miles per week and low magnesium levels are notoriously low in endurance athletes. I also follow a ketosis diet for as many as 6 months at a time, low magensium is also common with Keto diet.

I take up to 10 vitamin/mineral supplements, but kind of cycle them at various times. It’s impossible to really pinpoint anything, but I tend to think I personally got great benefits to my running through the addition of fish oil, vitamin B, vitamin D and magnesium. Specifically I feel benefits to both energy and anti-inflammation, at one point I scaled up to a half marathon everyday and was never even sore, whereas previously I’d run maybe 5 times a week and sometimes be stiff the next day following 7 mile runs. It’s definately not magic, these supplements don’t run the miles for me, but I do feel better during the runs, recover better, and it just creates this feedback loop where it feels I am growing/improving.