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massappeal

Re:Ask HN: Who is on my ballot tomorrow? (US) on Monday November 03, 2014 @12:48PM (#8552203)
democracy.com and crowdpac.com I think both have info on local candidates available
Agreed. I pulled it from the title of the article I originally read, but knowing that HN prefers primary sources, I linked to the video.

Edit: article link http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2014/10/2...

do not want
Re:Ask HN: Desktop sharing for Linux as simple as join.me? on Thursday September 25, 2014 @05:37PM (#8369876)
ah ya sorry, it's just for screen sharing. best of luck!
Re:Ask HN: Desktop sharing for Linux as simple as join.me? on Thursday September 25, 2014 @05:11PM (#8369761)
Screenleap
Re:Headphones/earphones for work on Monday September 22, 2014 @05:34PM (#8352785)
BeyerDynamic Custom One Pro
Re:What's the best way to filter startups? on Thursday September 18, 2014 @12:10AM (#8333642)
crunchbase data export
Re:Ask HN: Which headphones should I buy? on Wednesday September 10, 2014 @03:05PM (#8298390)
I just bought the Beyerdynamic Custom Pro One (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDBWrSENTps) for about $200 and I can't recommend them enough
This would be great if all of the footage was automatically archived to a publicly available website, but somehow I feel like this footage will be very hard to get a hold of, similar to FOIA Requests
Re:Show HN: Famous Outfits on Friday September 05, 2014 @12:36PM (#8274809)
Can you back some? I'd love this for some old Steve McQueen outfits
Re:Ask HN: Would you pay for a geo-link sharing service on Monday September 01, 2014 @06:44PM (#8254989)
nope
Re:Talent Wars: Silicon Valley vs. Wall Street on Friday August 22, 2014 @05:22PM (#8214034)
Ya, I disagree. If I was going to do my own start-up, I would definitely chose SF over NY.

New York just feels like the past to me; the old world where with old money where I'm likely to find people with generic backgrounds.

The West Coast is pushing the world forward, and I feel like I'm more likely to find people with the variety of backgrounds necessary to make a start-up successful.

Re:Ask HN: How do countries get out of poverty? on Saturday August 16, 2014 @04:57PM (#8187553)
This is a very complex question; I'll see if I can help.

Before I begin though, let me just say that you could take an entire undergrad and postgrad course on the economic, social and political development of Africa, because non-African nations have almost as much to do with the current state of Africa as the African nations.

Let's start by addressing why some countries are poor. There are many reasons some countries are poorer than others, and I would hate to over-generalize, but I'm going to. Access to International Trade, having resources worth trading Internationally for, the domestic resources available to develop a valuable workforce and a stable and effective form of governance.

Generally speaking.

Malawi for instance. Even if it had some tremendous resource it could sell in International markets, there aren't any regional buyers to pay for the development of further infrastructure. It doesn't have direct access to major trading centers and routes. If it wanted to develop a workforce to export something of value that wasn't dug up from the ground, it would need investment in order to pay for the education, infrastructure, etc. And that gets us into foreign aid and development banks, but we're just going to avoid that for now.

But even if it had all of that, the purchasing power of International markets greatly effect the International distribution of wealth.

Great example: The U.S. is one of the top oil-producing countries in the world. Despite this, we continue to import almost all of our oil. Why is this? Because American energy companies make more money by selling our oil internationally than they would domestically, so they do, and we end up buying cheaper oil from somewhere else.

Even if Malawi was swimming in some resource, maintaining domestic ownership of said resources and making it cheap enough to compete with countries that heavily subsidize certain industries can make it impossible to repeat.

Another great example of this: NAFTA.

The North American Free Trade Agreement is a FTA between Canada, U.S. and Mexico. We promised Mexico that by enacting this agreement, American companies would move all their factories from Asia to Mexico, employing millions. What happened though was that even after NAFTA, it was still cheaper for us to manufacture in Asia. But what the U.S. and Canada got in exchange for the "promise" was the removal of import tariffs on Financial Capital and Corn, among other things. As it happens, the U.S. subsidizes the Corn industry here to the tune of $9-12b per year.

As a result, it became cheaper for Mexico to import Corn from the U.S. than it was to buy domestically. And in case you don't know this, Corn ("maize") is a huge staple of Mexican agriculture. They make everything out of corn. So now, all of a sudden, Mexico has millions and millions of unemployed farmers. Who do you think has been rushing to the American borders all these years?

On top of that, by allowing us to freely invest in Mexican companies without tariffs, American banks purchased controlling interests in almost all of Mexico's highest-grossing companies. So anytime a Mexican company makes money, the revenue flows back to NYC, rather than back into Mexico.

I tried to keep that simple and direct. I'm sure I missed some details on a lot of that, so please correct where I erred.

Hope this helped!

Re:Ask HN: Any disruptive startups in wealth management? on Saturday August 16, 2014 @01:58PM (#8186927)
I don't know about 'disruptive', but I know there are companies like WealthFront and SimpleBank are in the private banking/wealth management space
Re: on Saturday August 16, 2014 @01:44PM (#8186883)
given that the funds have already been approved for the state's alternative, I wouldn't hold my breath
Re:Ask HN: Anyone to coach me as a startup creator? on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @02:26AM (#8166759)
lol the irony is killing me right now
google maps, gmail and google docs would be tough to replace, but I think we'd adapt pretty quickly. waze is pretty good, outlook is different but not necessarily bad, and I could probably use Dropbox more. And to be honest I search more on DuckDuckGo now than I do Google. I don't think google is indispensable, it's just consolidated, which makes it more convenient.
Re:Hatch, a combination of Tinder/OkCupid and Linkedin on Saturday August 02, 2014 @03:24AM (#8124318)
can you elaborate a little bit for me? why the distaste for QuickMVP?
Livin the dream, Dang
Re:Ask HN: Should I be a plumber? on Friday August 01, 2014 @03:04PM (#8122195)
Re:How Marvel Became the Envy and Scourge of Hollywood on Friday August 01, 2014 @02:42PM (#8122092)
I would stay away from the lot. They are like bad Michael Bay movies with costumes.

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