I believe he’s saying the opposite - that people like to think of blockchain as trust in technology, but in reality you are still trusting in people.
Any evaluation of the security of the system has to take the whole socio-technical system into account. Too many blockchain enthusiasts focus on the technology and ignore the rest.
As a founder I've raised through crowdfunding multiple times. The experience is great on both the startup and the investor side, and I love that crowdfunding lets more startups get off the ground, especially ones that don't have access to SV money.
But this should really be thought of as "gambling" instead of "investing." There's very little ability to do due diligence and the companies are usually so early that it's impossible to know if it's going to work or not. However, if you have money you're willing to lose it's a lot more rewarding than spending it at the blackjack table.
I agree with this premise regarding equity crowdfunding as it currently stands in absence of any professional guidance. We at XX have tried to improve this and mitigate risk by:
1) having a screening committee with deep founder operational experience and industry insight to identify the companies most likely to be successful.
2) attracted exceptional startups to broaden our applicant pipeline by making it open to the global community and guaranteed a $50k pre-seed investment.
3) had three month mentoring period where startups were stress tested and cleared for launch on Wefunder.
It's similar to LPs investing in a VC fund and trusting that the VCs performed the proper diligence.
In the Wrong Platform section he mentions how the new PayPal CEO wanted to switch the company to Windows and “Fortunately for PayPal they switched CEOs instead.” That CEO they gave the boot? Elon Musk.
It was probably still a good decision and maybe we wouldn’t have spaceX or Tesla without that change, but still hilarious!
IIRC from reading the book PayPal Wars, Elon wanted to switch PayPal over to Windows because he saw it as the future. At the time, PayPal was on Unix. Max Levchin and the other main programmers didn’t want to switch. The disagreement on platform eventually came to a head and Elon was replaced by the board with Peter Thiel.
If you haven’t read PayPal Wars, it’s a great book.
Agreed. I think it was also a power struggle over which engineering team would be in control moving forward. Musk’s X.com was built on windows and he wanted everyone to switch over on the merge.
The Elon Musk biography has Musk's side of the story in the appendix. Paraphrasing, but basically he saw the tooling for Windows software development (Visual Studio etc) as being more coherent/batteries included/practical, in part because of Microsoft's investments in gaming and needing those tools to work on commercial games, which were stupidly complex even back then. Keep in mind Musk had some experience in the gaming industry. I'm not familiar with Linux, but it was likely rudimentary by comparison at the time.
Another good point he brings up is that you could find a lot of smart engineering talent, who is working on games, by using their tools/language of choice. SpaceX uses a similar tactic on a more subject matter level. People that can understand 3D game programming are probably a great pool of talent for writing rocket software.
In Gavin Newsom’s book Citizenville he talked about how, after becoming SF mayor, he discovered that fare collection cost as much as the revenue generated from fares. He started the process of making the bus free but was told by so many advisors that the busses would become “dumpsters on wheels,” from a combination of homeless people using them for shelter and people not respecting services that are free, that the plan was scrapped.
Pretty asinine of him to back off at that. Homeless people aren't paying fares already. There are also 60k homeless in LA while 1 million people ride ride metro a day; even if every single homeless person boarded metro one day it would be a blip on your radar compared to everyone else.
What fares hurt most are the working families in LA who pay $76 a month to ride the bus to work or school because there is no other choice. The fact that Newsom didn't connect this dot doesn't surprise me.
I think the argument was more that the bus system was already a pretty terrible experience, and making it more terrible would discourage even more people from taking the bus and create a downward spiral of quality.
The obvious correction is to make the bus experience less terrible, but I’m guessing that’s hard w/o increasing taxes or fares, both or which come w serious political and real world costs.
To be fair Twitter already has a lot of prohibitions in place for ads, many of them very subjective (e.g. Hateful Content and Inappropriate Content) so the free speech boat sailed a long time ago.
Investors divesting from fossil fuels sounds a lot like sanctions in that they “don’t work until they work.”[1] It would take an overwhelming number of investors to make divestment really hurt, which is unlikely. And I definitely agree that focusing on supporting climate change impact is better than starving the polluters. But it seems intellectually dishonest to say that divestors are “wasting their time.” And there’s no reason you can’t do both.
Wouldn’t it be better to reduce demand? Even just now where supply was literally taken out with missles (or were they drones?) that doesn’t affect how much fossil fuel is used. Why would divestment work any better?
To reduce demand you should either create cheaper ways to store alternative energy or make carbon based fuels more expensive with a carbon tax.
Can’t it be both? Those aren’t mutually exclusive, and in fact are hardly even related in terms of implementation.
And taking out supply to drive up cost of fossil fuel will absolutely have an impact. At least a few people will opt for the fuel economy version of their new car in the next few days after seeing the new sticker price of a gallon of gas.
>Investors divesting from fossil fuels sounds a lot like sanctions in that they “don’t work until they work.”[1]
Sure, but you can say that about any cause. Sounding like something is vague, and thats the larger point from the article. People need to quantify the actual impact of their actions w.r.t. divestment. Whereas, its easier to quantify the impact of other more positive/creative actions (e.g. transitioning from petroleum to clean energy).
>And there’s no reason you can’t do both.
Oh, there are more than two ideas that activists have. There is "no reason" you can't do a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and more and more. You only have limited resources to expend here - your free time, energy and motivation.
Does everyone here also drive a base model Honda Civic because “car hardware is done”? This is a luxury product and people upgrade because it’s fun and feels great to have the fastest phone and fanciest camera. It’s not that big a deal, and it’s definitely not a ripoff.
Personally I drive the top-spec Civic of 15 years ago. I would never own a current luxury item because I don't think it's worth spending my entire life working for a product that will become normal a couple of weeks after I buy it.
Humans are only sensitive to change. A positive change feels good. No change feels normal. A negative change feels awful. A sensible person would try to fill their life with positive change.
For what it’s worth, a 2019 base-model Civic includes a backup camera, automatic emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, lane-keep assist, road departure mitigation, more airbags, and every other safety improvement Honda engineers have come up with since 2004. It’s also more fuel efficient, which would reduce your consumption of fossil fuels.
Thanks for confirming my point. A personal vehicle capable of effortlessly transporting you, four passengers and ample luggage across thousands of miles at 70mph+ isn't even luxury!
Are folks running ML training algorithms on their phones? Why does one need the "fastest phone"? How many apps are there for which how fast your phone is even matters? I am not saying people shouldn't buy these phones but the pricing on these things is absolutely insane, it seems people are basically paying an Apple tax on these devices. Even high end devices from other manufacturers are not priced this crazy.
Nearly every road in the world has a speed limit. Car manufacturers still quote top speed and advertise based a cars racing pedigree.
95% of bankers and doctors driving BMW or Mercedes don’t use these features but still pay for them. Same with phones but a $1000 iPhone is far more in reach of aspirational buyers than a $50k German car.
We shouldn't need them, but we do, because the quality of consumer software is very poor these days. To enable "rapid" and "agile" development, where "customer value" is delivered "continuously", developers write under-optimised, resource-hungry software that never gets refactored.
You're absolutely correct that the prices of these phones are insane, but let's be honest here – a base-model Samsung Galaxy S10 is $899.99 MSRP. You can get them on Amazon for $699, which puts them at the same price as iPhone 11. So I'm not quite buying the Apple tax, unless your argument is that Apple is allowing everyone else to charge high prices, in which case you may be on to something.
This is a great point. It’s a premium product that people will buy simply because they like nice things.
I’ll buy one because I like buying new/nice things and the fact that for $1200 I’ll get a lot of value out of it, due to how much I use my phone is an added bonus.
This is definitely not a compelling upgrade for many people.
> Well, I do (although it's a base model Hyundai). I also still use an iPhone SE and will do for the foreseeable future.
I consider myself to have been "tricked by business" (as Macklemore would put it) when I bought a Tesla Model X in 2016. It replaced a 2014 LEAF, and I can honestly say that I regretted it and wished I had kept the LEAF. The difference in cost didn't make up for the difference in overall driving experience and utility for me. I've since traded in the Tesla for cheaper PHEV, and I'm much happier with that now.
I also am still using a Pixel 2. Nothing about anything else on the market today seems compelling enough to convince me to replace it. So I guess I'm joining a chorus on this thread.
Base Model 2014 Mazda 3, because yes, ICE car hardware has nearly peaked. I will continue to row my own gears in a little 40mpg sedan until electric is an attainable option. Same goes for phones. Buy cheap, buy well.
Those are all fair points, and I agree with you on each of them! But they have to do with buying new things in general, not the new iPhone specifically.
If you eat meat, drive a car, fly in planes, live in a big house, have kids, etc., buy all the iPhones you want. It’s not going to make a lick of difference when it comes to climate change.
This title is very misleading. Shopify has surpassed eBay in market cap, but is in a very different business. Same wrt amazon. Conflating market cap with market ownership is just confusing.
However, I really hope Shopify can figure out a way to make it easy to find quality sellers and replace Amazon’s dumpster fire of a third party marketplace. Trying to buy electronics or household products on amazon is a complete crapshoot these days.
Some of this feels very cherry-picked. They’re comparing lidar vs camera on snapshots, when a model will always be continuously built as the scene changes.
There’s also one instance where it gives lidar the advantage because it’s mounted on top of the car and can see over signs. What?!
I also feel that they make the 2D annotator's job very hard. I wore an eye patch yesterday (having fun with kids) and reality became extremely confusing. Our brain does not annotate on static 2D images. We annotate on stereoscopic video of moving objects.
This is a very zero-sum take on the project, where it’s very possible that creating more diversity in the neighborhoods these families are moving to raises the level of education and outcomes for everyone involved. Making some people smarter doesn’t require making others dumber.
> Making some people smarter doesn’t require making others dumber.
On the other hand, it doesn't have to be a requirement to happen. Making some people smarter can actually have a negative effect on the smarter ones.
This can be illustrated with schools, where it benefits the troublemakers to be placed in a group with calm children, but it is on the expense of the calm children who will now be disrupted in their studying.
In the scandinavian countries, this is often done to children. Troublemakers, most often boys, are placed together with groups of calm children, often girls. This is such a common practice that there is an expression for such girls - pillow girls, "kuddflickor".
That said, isn't the Chetty proposal (moving from low-opportunity location to higer-opportunity location) basically why there are millions of migrants in Europe right now.
It may not be as straight forward as you seem to think it is.
Girls are generally expected to be better behaved. This can be extremely suffocating and unhealthy.
If they are exposed to "troublemaker" boys and learn to have a little back bone and stand up for themselves (to possibly oppressive adults), it's still less socially acceptable for a girl than for a boy. So then she blames the "troublemaker" boy to cover for herself because he will get in less trouble than her and that's what the adults find plausible anyway.
It's entirely possible that even if she tried to accept the blame, the adults would interpret that as her trying to be kind to him and cover for him.
Any evaluation of the security of the system has to take the whole socio-technical system into account. Too many blockchain enthusiasts focus on the technology and ignore the rest.