wils1245

I think you’re both overstating how widely known this controversy is and understating how bad suing a tech blogger would look (see: Streisand Effect). I’m a techie and have barely heard about this. People who went and bought new phones will be pissed, but the majority of users won’t care.

This response owns the responsibility of countering misconceptions. The huge majority of Apple users won’t remember this in a month.

This story is a good example of how the tide of public opinion has turned against the tech industry. There’s no tech angle here - some percentage of people pay for sex, and some percentage of that group uses their work email to do so. Some of those work in tech.

These facts tell us precisely nothing about whether tech workers are more or less likely to pay for sex or engage in illegal behavior, or whether it’s a particularly bad problem at Microsoft or Amazon.

Saving on taxes is a good reason to contribute to a 401K. Just be mindful of the fees.

Age is unquestionably a useful attribute to use in targeting advertising. But in certain cases we've decided to impose rules that make advertising suboptimal in the interests of building a more fair society.

The tide of public opinion seems to have turned against argument 1. I don't follow law close enough to really know if legal decisions have also been turning against it.

And the next day, those age-based ads will be replaced by other user attributes closely correlated with age.

A US Supreme Court case comes to mind, Batson v Kentucky:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batson_v._Kentucky

In which it became illegal to dismiss a juror based on race. A simple, sensible fix, which most agree did very little to stop race based discrimination from juries. Doing so just became a bit more complicated.

The incumbent taxi industry is way worse than you describe. Prices aren’t five bucks more, they’re often 2X, with worse drivers due to the lack of a passenger feedback loop. Not to mention that a substantial portion of those profits getting sucked up by the medallion holders, who are much more absentee landlords than Uber or Lyft.

I talked once to someone who honestly thought medallion fees went to pay for driver health insurance and benefits. The status quo was just as exploitive.

Would you describe the present environment as chaotic? Rideshare companies have solved the problems you describe.

You can debate whether it’s fair that they’ve profited by breaking the rules. But they’ve made a very compelling case that the rules aren’t needed anymore.

It’s been so crazy to see things like that just papered over in thread after thread. People talk about trading volume as though they have the faintest idea what the true, non manipulative volume is. The term “market cap” being thrown around as though anything remotely close to the figure could be realized.

I’m starting to lose sympathy for the people who are ultimately going to get hurt when this crashes. The signs are not hard to see at all.

Why do you think that it's a reasonable expectation that an economy offers a 1000X multiplier on your money? Where is this value supposed to come from? By altering the means of exchanging capital a significant number of people get 1000X richer?

Those kinds of gains can only come at the expense of other "investors".

The regulations are more about regulating the ability to make money off of naive investors, in my view. You should be able to offer the ability to make risky investments to people, but there should be enforcement mechanisms to ensure you're not misleading people.

Their slogan is pretty funny: "The next cryptocurrency." Like the last one, only newer.

He is an improvement on some social issues, but Friedman credits him for his anti corruption drive, which is a joke. M.B.S is every bit as corrupt as those he’s arrested.

Speaking from the US, it's too bad that pharmacists are so disempowered here. I was just in France, and my friend came down with an eye infection. He went to a pharmacist, who just gave him antibiotics and told him to come back in three days if it didn't go away.

We both agreed it would never have been so easy in the states.

Parent comment is likely referring to the lawsuit against them which has recently seemed to take a turn for the worse for Uber.

During my last job hunt I was told that some companies target 30% of total comp in stock. If you get options and the stock goes up, you can do quite well.

Kind of an ironic example, lawyers have terrible working conditions. Pay is great, but the partner system of advancement is dehumanizing, and encourages cutthroat behavior and insane working hours.

Do you still think the Tether is still held by the thieves? They traded it for other cryptocurrencies, out of Bitfinex, the second they stole it.

That is, of course, if it actually was a theft, and it was actually for $30 million. It's a single source currency, no one but the people running Tether knows what's actually behind it.

Bitfinex controls Tether, a single source cryptocurrency supposedly backed by and pegged to the US dollar. The market cap of Tether has risen $188 million dollars to $678 million in one month:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

If Tether is what they say it is, this can only come from investments of US dollars. Ie nearly $400 million dollars of investment in one month.

On November 21 Tether announced a hack in which they lost $30 million.

Bitfinex is extremely likely to be insolvent at this point. Users are complaining of an inability to withdraw funds on Reddit, and Bitfinex's Twitter has a days old announcement of a supposed DDoS attack, with no updates:

https://twitter.com/bitfinex

https://www.reddit.com/r/bitfinex/comments/7g8cp3/eth_withdr...

Tether has been traded on other exchanges for other cryptos, meaning that these other cryptos have been inflated by purchases with fake money.

This is a good outline of the scenario I think is about to play out:

https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/11/26/the-bear-case-for-crypto...

Bitfinex'ed is an anonymous Twitter and Medium account that is explaining the Tether fraud much better than I can:

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed

If you believe them you must believe that they've received $250 million dollars in the month of November alone.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

This on a daily pattern that looks like a step function. Where could this money possibly be coming from? Anonymous millionaires?

At this point the arguments for or against the idea of cryptocurrency are pretty irrelevant. Bitfinex has injected millions of dollars of fake money into the ecosystem, users are reporting an ability to withdraw money from it on Reddit, and their Twitter account's last message was reports of a DDoS two days ago with no updates.

https://twitter.com/bitfinex https://www.reddit.com/r/bitfinex/comments/7fx9z9/bitfinex_w...

Perhaps Bitcoin will recover from this fraud or another cryptocurrency will take the lead in the space, but we are headed for a crash.

For me, their innovation was that they were the first online retailer that inspired rock solid confidence in their delivery. If I order something on Amazon, it’s at my door in two days. Every time. I don’t need to check my shipping status, and with their pricing model obscuring shipping costs, I don’t need to think about the practicalities of shipping at all.

As the article demonstrates, this luxury comes with a high social cost.

Ok, fair enough, I was lazy in my Googling. But the point stands. Money yielding 0% and wasting away due to inflation is a straw man.

A quote from The Four Pillars of Investing:

"Of the four key areas of investment knowledge — theory, history, psychology, and investment industry practices — the lack of historical knowledge is the one that causes the most damage. In finance, there is no controversy: the same speculative follies play out with almost clock-like regularity about once a generation."

A whole lot of investors have come to believe that history is obsolete, and later regretted it.

GBP inflation is currently less than 2%, and there are many very low risk options to account for it.

The fact that money sitting in a checking account depreciates due to inflation is a terrible argument for cryptocurrency. No one actually does that with any significant amount of capital.

I’d be interested to see a timeplot of the timing of ICO’s against the price/trading volume of bitcoin. My feeling is that there’s a lot of wash trading / market manipulation of bitcoin going on by the perpetrators of ICO schemes, to provide themselves with a way to funnel money out of crypto into dollars. The Bitfinex / tether fraud only works of bitcoin keeps going up.

I think economic competition between cities can be a healthy thing, but these sweepstakes style contests for things like corporate HQ’s, sporting teams/events, etc seem to usually get really out of hand. It feels like there’s some committee within a government who’s only goal is to win the prize. Whether the people of the city/state/whatever actually _want_ to win is entirely beside the point.

The Fresno example is especially disturbing. I’d really like to read a constitutional analysis of that kind of thing, it feels like a vast overreach of authority to offer so much autonomy to Amazon.

I had a driver once who was using a rental car under an agreement tailored to ride sharing. I can’t recall the company he used, though.

>>I feel deranged pointing this out, but hiring triple the headcount you need to run your business is not a progressive social value. I don't know what it is.

To me it feels like a byproduct of an overemphasis on a certain kind of inclusiveness, in which people are elevated based on how long they’ve been around and how much buyin there is into the mission. Everyone’s opinion is valued, everyone wants resources, everyone wants to be promoted. If there’s not money constraints or a sense of practicality driving decisions, everyone gets headcount and promotions, driving bloat.

My last job was with a very mission driven startup. We were short on money so headcount wasn’t bloated, but we were plagued by “managers” with no one under them who’d been around since the beginning and didn’t contribute much. The product drifted, and we wasted a lot of time.

I switched to a new, more unapologetically capitalist company, and my team has been subject to some absolutely cold blooded re-orgs. It’s a much less friendly place, but much, much better run in terms of getting stuff done.

Not sure what the moral is. I made some great friends at the first company, not so much at the second. But the new place is in many ways a much less frustrating place to work.

It’s the parent company’s CMS, not Wired’s. I’d bet that the people at Wired are more annoyed by it than anyone.