wils1245

How much are you willing to spend on a nice user interface? The whole point of passive investing is that you rarely interact with your account.

Even a slight difference in fees is worth thousands in the long run.

Depending on the role, I find it hard to believe that people being motivated by money is a bad thing as the company grows. Sure, at a start up it’s easy to connect the dots with what you work on and your end-customers, so it’s good to care about and empathize with them. But if your job is to keep the lights on, that passion for the cause isn’t going to feel vindicated too often.

Not to say that keeping the lights on can’t be a rewarding problem to work on, good plumbers will take pride in there work and find it interesting. But do you care if your plumbers are passionate about the building they are working on? No.

I thought the point was that we should look at IQ in determining punishment and risk of recidivism. Which is a deeply misguided idea.

OJ is an interesting example, as his sentence for armed robbery was considered extreme compared to the facts of his case, and influenced by the fact he away with murder.

I think it’s troubling that judges have the ability to hand down sentences far above some established norm, even if those sentences are legal.

The availability of ridesharing lessens the need for car ownership, which is a huge win for cities because it reduces the need to devote space for the storage of automobiles.

The article ignores this benefit entirely, then makes the contradictory points that a) ridesharing apps actually increase traffic, and b) ridesharing apps siphon riders from public traffic.

All in all it’s written from the perspective of someone who hasn’t had to drive much in a high density urban area, where parking is nearly as much of a headache to figure out as traffic.

There’s a big difference between empathy and guilt. That people feel guilty and responsible for what happened to the man is a legacy of his manipulation, and not something to be celebrated.

Gee if you buy into that narrative you might just like... Peter Thiel’s new media company!

You are vastly underplaying the amount of power an (unelected) man of Thiel’s wealth and political connections has to shape the direction of our democracy. He wants power, knows perfectly well what he wants to do with it, and cares very little what anyone has to say about it. The only, very limited recourse a citizen has are boycotts and petitions to reduce that power.

The dataset you are basing your assumptions on is extremely small. Your reference should be the history of highly volitle assets, not the history of bitcoin. The behavior after previous collapses tell you precisely nothing about what is going to happen next.

I don't see how a decentralized cryptocurrency could possibly regulate itself efficiently. How would you go about banning even the most basic manipulations?

Take wash trading. How can you possibly ban wash trading? To do this you need to verify that identity of seller X != identity of seller Y. Even dismissing currencies that actively prohibit this verification (Monero), how do you possibly accomplish this in a decentralized currency?

Even without the identities issue, who is looking at bitcoin governance and thinking that deciding protocol changes with a decentralized electoral system is going to produce anything but gamesmanship and paralysis. Promising newcomer coins Abc will have the same issues once there's real money at stake.

And yes. Manipulation exist in the traditional monetary system. However, regulations raise the cost of manipulation to prohibitively high levels for most people. And yes, congress is dysfunctional. But underneath the chaos we have a set of fairly well established rules, and changing those rules didn't require forking the currency.

The problems with our economic system are political, not technological. What crypto brings to money is superfluous technology and even worse politics than we already have.

What if someone wrecks my house?

The decentralized nature of cryptocurrencies means that implementing countermeasures to market manipulation is severely hampered. It's a fatal flaw of to the idea of cryptocurrencies as something socially useful.

10% is plenty to drive business to Lyft, especially with Lyft’s better brand.

That's a superb writeup. Really uncovers differentiators that I could feel but not put my finger on.

It doesn’t solve the problem. It’s Google’s problem. If Google is going to do nothing whatsoever to secure their property, it’s not the police’s job to do it for them.

These bikes are a nusicance in Mountain View if you don’t work for Google. They’re left all over the place - in lawns, in landscaping, right in the middle of the sidewalk. The article blames non-Google employees, but they’re often carelessly placed right near Google buildings with nothing else but office buildings around.

If I lived in Mountain View (I used to work there) I’d help myself too.

You should ask their advice after the system they built successfully weathers a recession.

>>I think the hardcore bears are just plain wrong, here. I don't know whether or not Tesla is over-valued

The misconception I think a lot of Tesla fans have is that great product = great business. How much do you think Tesla's business is worth? A billion dollars? A trillion? Probably not the latter, and if they depended on that valuation to continue to do business (by virtue of access to continued investment), it wouldn't matter how great their cars are.

Their actual market cap is 50 billion dollars, more than Ford, and they will need to raise more money to continue operations. Ford makes 500 times more cars than them (based on some quick Googling, .3% market share of cars vs 15% for Ford). So if you're thinking Tesla is not overvalued, you have to think that Tesla will acquire a truly massive chunk of the car market, at the expense of well funded incumbents who have a head start in many aspects of car manufacturing and branding.

My point is that whether or not Tesla is overvalued is as important as whether or not their cars are great. I think their cars are great, but I'm a Tesla bear because I think expecting them to justify even a tenth of their valuation is unlikely.

I bet it’s different for various niches. Consider young families. Disney absolutely dominates children’s content, and very old content still resonates with kids. My niece and and nephew were obsessed with Toy Story, Finding Dory, Frozen, etc. I bet Disney’s streaming service will be the first one families buy.

The question is, “can Tesla build a production pipeline before its ability to raise money ends?”

In other words “whether” and “when” aren’t different questions in this case.

The doubt on Tesla is not whether the cars are great, it’s whether they can scale production. You need both to be a Model T.

How can you look at the valuation of Tesla and think that Musk lacks public support? The company is worth more than Ford, while delivering a fraction of the cars. The difference in output is made up by faith in his promises.

Yes, that’s what I mean. Pointing that out because athletic programs are sometimes “profitable” because they bill the school for stadiums. My alma matter charges a yearly fee straight to the students for their new football stadium.

There’s a much more robust black market already in place for marijuana than for cigarettes. Washington has all the same products and is right next door, and taxes at 3% [1]. Also at least in CA municipalities are adding their own taxes, so the distance you need to travel to enable black market arbitrage might not be much.

1 - https://dor.wa.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/Docs/Reports/2...

Two things of interest that the article doesn’t go into:

- Taxes on weed in CA are going to be very high, ~20%. This may drive black market sales.

- Online ordering through Eaze is popular, which might drive the familiar winner take all online commerce market dynamic. A lot of people don’t care for the dispensary experience.

At the end of the day, this is an agricultural product, and a commodity. It was optimistically compared with beer, but beer is made from a recipe, of which there are endless variations to try. Some heavy users care about certain strains and the like, but I have a feeling that for most people weed is weed. The new edible products are a development, but those too will be comoditized.

Spot on. As further example, check out Barry Sanders highlights:

https://youtu.be/eygZLsdKGQM

The NFL in slow motion can be beautiful to watch in slow motion. These plays aren’t nearly as exciting without the risk of contact and Sanders’ opportunity and ability to break tackles.

That doesn’t mean the game as we know it shouldn’t go.

I think a lawsuit stopping the sport is highly unlikely. It’ll die off gradually as the game is starved off of young participants, which sap it of both elite players and viewers. See: boxing.

And I think it’s much too soon to say other sports with occasional head impacts are bad to do now that football is known to be unsafe. Football has head to head collisions as a matter of course, every play. Soccer, with the header, is much more likely to be next to come under scrutiny IMO.

I don’t think concussion rate is the right metric. Football’s CTE risk is supposed to be from the incidental head to head contact that happens every play.

A couple that’s related to me had their kid play football in a rural area of the US. She’s a lawyer, and he has some memory issues from high school football. It blows me away that their kid plays.

That may be so, but the widespread knowledge that most/all football players sustain serious brain damage was not there yet. Big hits that left the opponent slow to get up or unsteady on his feet were celebrated, on the assumption that he’d be able to shake it off after a day or so.

That said, I do think the destructiveness of football in knees and backs has long been known. I remember them being detailed when reading “where are they now?” articles in Sports Illustrated as a kid (I’m 30).

Is the profit you’re counting at Clemson including stadium outlays?