hectorr

Yeah. Prop 13 massively depresses housing turnover and reduces property tax revenue, which means they need to collect more from income tax. Malcom Gladwell's excellent podcast on golf courses has a great discussion of this.

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/11-a-good-walk-spoile...

The question isn't who gets their money back, the question is who has to pay and/or take on the risk. In 2008, the banks were largely bailed out by taxpayers. In this case the hacker 'paid' because what they held was no longer recognized as ETH.

Even then, the hacker didn't lose anything. He might have a legal argument that he has been unjustly deprived of his wealth, but the legal system isn't generally available to criminals. Also, there's an alternative timeline where ETH fails because of this breach of trust, ETC takes off, and the hacker gets rich. But since the value creating developers supported to forked chain, that's where the value went.

Fulfillment is a hard thing to quantify. Maybe unemployed people feel bad because they aren't doing anything, or maybe they feel bad because there is nothing for an unemployed person to do when everyone is working. Maybe they feel bad because other people make them feel bad for being unemployed, through their pity or indifference or even well meaning attempts to help.

You are completely right that it sucks to not have a job, but its possible that's a reflection of how social life is structured and not some biological Protestant work ethic. Right now "I work at X company" is shorthand for "I am a a productive member of society". That certainly benefits companies and certain types of people. But it's not the only imaginable value system. And I suspect that people who feel valuable are a lot less likely to find solace in bottle of pills.

Yes. This isn't Wall Street is bilking the common man. This is one side of Wall Street trying to squeeze the other side, and appealing to the public to help their case. It's a tough market for big money right now. Opportunities are scarce and their customers are pushing down costs, so they're putting pressure on their suppliers.

Has anyone tried Roon Labs? It's a high end library manager that partners with Tidal.

Not really. It's still too hard to do from both a regulatory and technical standpoint. There is enough liquidity and infrastructure around BTC to be feasible, but the regulators squashed that idea.

Also ETFs are great, but they are not a panacea for every asset class. Sometimes there are fundamental reasons why they don't work, but the idea is so buzzy that you can make a buck off selling garbage and calling it an ETF. Reminds me of something...

The 2 is more important than the 20.

Maybe all asset classes are undervalued relative to the currencies they are priced in.

This is not good. But you have to know what the standard ratio is, and how things breaks down demographically, to know how bad it really is.

I agree with you, this is all true in theory, but this definition also excludes non-dividend stocks that offer no governance controls. Like Snap, Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. In addition, the move to buybacks in lieu of dividends in many companies changes the shareholder dynamics considerably. So does the fact that a ton of money is indexing these days.

The market has fundamentally changed. Graham was right, as proved by Buffett, but even Berkshire can't make Berkshire returns anymore. To make money in investing you have to be right when other people are wrong, otherwise the value is priced in. So speculation does have economic benefit, in that it serves to help find new value and fund boundary-pushing projects. It is VC with more liquidity and lower barriers to entry.

Sure, a lot of speculators will lose their shirt, but who cares? As long as they aren't over levered, the rest of society benefits from the fruits of their risk.

If you want extrinsic rewards, you need to provide extrinsic value.

I have very mixed feelings about what Manning did. I also respect the moral courage it took to do them, and to face the consequences.

IIRC Clapper (NSA) was asked a question by Wyden (D-OR) about a classified program in an open hearing. Wyden knew the real answer from a previous classified briefing, and forced Clapper to either lie or violate secrecy in public. So Clapper lied.

It's not just about a massive conflict kinetically disrupting those supply lines. Influcencing those supply lines is a key tactic in the day-by-day posturing and low-level conflicts of geopolitics.

Depends on the interest rate and your opportunity costs.

There are a lot of bad reasons for this, and a lot of bad impacts, but there is at least one benefit for humanity: American healthcare dollars create intense competition to do to do aggressive and innovative biomedical research and product development.

A lot of them are, for the reasons you point out. But they really are not that different than other financial instruments in kind, just in maturity.

What does it mean to own a share of Snapchat, Facebook, or Google? You can't influence these companies, they don't pay dividends, so the value of a share is just whatever the mob wants to pay for it. Goes up on good news, down on bad. Bonds are even worse, that's just someone saying sure, I'll pay you back later. These things have law developed around them now, but didn't when they first emerged.

It all depends on your risk profile. If you have high risk tolerance, and think that you can mitigate some risk with being ahead of the market in technical and/or business skills, there is no reason not to get involved in these.

I thought Matt Levine's daily had a good take:

"The deep message is that if you define criminality based on your negative perception of some disliked group, then your criminals are going to look like that group. If you assume that rural white people with guns are hunters and urban minorities with guns are gang members, then your predictive policing efforts will look for guns in cities rather than forests. If you assume that Wall Street is an industry whose business model is fraud, then your predictive policing efforts will look for fraud in midtown Manhattan. In both cases, it is at least plausible that the group perception leads to the definition of criminality, rather than the reverse. What makes you a criminal is not doing a certain objectively defined sort of act; it's being a certain sort of person."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-26/bank-meet...

I don't give money to panhandlers, I think it encourages bad behavior. But to anyone who asks, I look them in the eye, and say "sorry, not today". I'm surprised how few people do this, it takes less effort than actively ignoring someone.

He's providing an economic benefit to society - internalizing (to consumers) the externality of IOT botnets. It's now on the consumers to further internalize to cost to manufacturers through product selection, class action, or both.

Connecting critical life support systems to the internet, and not having any contingency for an outage, sounds a lot like malpractice. Hospitals have fail-safes, and if they don't it's a far larger problem than using an insecure IOT device.

This is a lot of finance works. You offer a consumer product full of awesome features and freebies that is a loss-leader, and make up for it on interest. Cash back when you finance a car, credit card miles, discount stock and RE brokerages, etc.

Isn't this why we pay for all those fancy color scanners?

While this is true, it is extremely hard to do in practice. You have to get good information, make sure it is good information, convince a market that it is good information, and then prevent your competitors and your clients from simply replicating your process.

That's true, but language is constantly evolving. I actually think we need a cultural shift in how we perceive work. The high intrinsic and extrinsic value we place on it served a lot of communities really well for millennia, but things really are changing these days with robotics and narrow AI. Language is one of the main tools we have to work with.

I think it has a lot to do with the app. It's more about getting out than getting home. Sure, taxis are usually available if you're out in a town, but anyone who's ever tried to call one to pick them up from home on short notice is often going to be annoyed with the quality of dispatcher service. Even if the dispatcher is great and the taxi arrives quickly, anyone who has had a bad experience before will be anxious given the lack of reliable information. The ETA with a map is a huge factor in improving the experience.

I also wouldn't overlook the novelty factor in the idea gaining traction. It took a mundane process (calling a dispatcher) and made it sleek, hip, and fun. Especially in the early days, when you'd meet a lot of diverse drivers, not just professionals. This made a huge difference in making Uber a 'thing', not just a marginally improved commodity service.

> my ideal fantasy world

If you haven't yet, you should read up on what Ethereum is doing.

Credit card networks (Visa/MC/Amex, not Chase/Wells Fargo/etc) rely on their fixed infrastructure to extract profits. If Amazon can disrupt that business it'd be a massive shift.

This makes sense. Social companies now own eyeballs. They sell eyeballs to advertisers, something legacy media used to do. But legacy media didn't own eyeballs through the magic of journalism, it owned them through massive monopolies in print (local) and telecom (national). Journalists don't like to talk about this, because it hurts their ego.