reckoner2

People seem to believe that cryptocurrencies are either a scam/waste/bubble or that they are an amazing technology that the future of financial tech will be built upon. And there is this battle between the sides.

I think that both are equally true! Prices are obviously driven by speculation, there is tonnes of fraud, and no regulation. It is a wild wild west goldrush situation right now. Maybe this is unfortunate but I'm also not surprised by it. Isn't this how all markets get started? I don't have great sources but I think the situation was similar for the securities markets for many years.

I also think the blockchain is an incredibly remarkable piece of technology that it will be put to use in increasingly important and useful roles and that cryptocurrencies are here to stay. Both can be true.

How is this possibly true? I've increased my vertical jump by nearly two entire feet through years of training in volleyball. Everyone can increase their vertical just like they can increase their squat. It's a full body compound movement.

What it can enable/improve upon according to Goldman Sachs [0]:

Assorted banking use cases, trade settlements, payments to notaries, voting systems, vehicle registrations, wire fees, gun checks, academic records, cataloging ownership of works of art.

The Ethereum alliance contains many big name companies such as Mastercard as Cisco [1]. They all believe there is real use in Ethereum

[0] http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/pages/macroeconomic...

[1] https://entethalliance.org/

It is tough, if not impossible to know for sure in cases like these. The most effective way is the use of controlled studies. The population is split such that the only difference between the groups is one variable. The very simplified version is that sometimes you find that there is only evidence for a correlation (between say relationships and good health), and other times you can find evidence for causation.

In this case it looks like they found the later.

The quality of social interaction is very important. None of the relationships you described seemed overly healthy. The study shows that it was good, warm, reciprocal relationships that factored into improved mental health. I work on a trading floor as well, and while I do enjoy it, I put in lots of work to have healthy social relationships outside of work.

This approach has always interested me. I can train an decent Cats Vs. Dogs classifier in a few minutes. But real human intelligence takes many years of continuous and varied input to develop.

Are there systems out there that are taking influence from newborns being exposed to the world? An unsupervised learning system with a huge array of inputs running for years?

Has anyone been able to do this? Is anyone working on it?

I only follow the field as a hobby, but as far as I can tell we are nowhere near getting to this point. I think the ability to combine all these parts in a way that the sum is greater than it's parts is going to require many many breakthroughs still.

As an owner of an iPhone 7 and a Pixel I'd say there are not many. Google Assistant is way ahead of Siri at pretty much every imaginable task, and Google Photos can do a lot more than iOS Photos.

That said, none of those features interest me much. And I'm not sure how many average consumers they do interest. It's more of a 'oh, that's cool I guess'. I prefer my iPhone 7 still.

This might not be a useful answer for you, but are you sure any of that is necessary? You can spend months pre-validating an idea and never get anywhere.

Go talk to potential customers now. Find people who are willing to pay for what your are going to build. Once you know they exist, then you can start worrying about market size and the rest. At this point having real life people who want to pay you is infinitely more valuable than any hypothetical data and analysis.

> However, a human prodigy can apply their genius to many domains

I'm not sure how true this is. It's pretty rare to find someone who is a genius in more than one domain. Einstein was famously offered the presidency of Israel. Sure, he could probably do well in other sciences, but he was smart enough to know he could not apply his genius to unrelated domains.

Canada welcomes you. We even have a startup-specific Visa program [0]. Toronto has a growing tech scene and is one of the most diverse cities in the world. Montreal and Ottawa are wonderful. Waterloo has a booming tech scene, and the university is becoming very well known.

[0] http://www.canadavisa.com/the-entrepreneur-start-up-visa-pro...

There are professionals out there whose job it is to help out people in situations like yours. Before you make any life changing decisions I would talk to one.

CEO's, Hedgefund Managers, Sport Stars, they all talk to psychologists. Give it a try.

I don't mean to come off as harsh, but your reasons are wrong. Piketty isn't some random guy who threw together some numbers and came up with a theory. His work is extensively researched and reviewed. He's thought of and responded to every objection you made. If you are interested in the topic then you should definitely read his book.

Take a look at your numbers again. You have made multiple mistakes. Your 8.4% annualized rate is wrong - You can't just take the start and end points to calculate an average. Plus, you are plugging quarterly data into yearly calculations.

> Here is a question Piketty didn't ask: what percent of dynastic, billionaire wealth was created in a single generation in America? Not addressed at all. (And I read his book and wrote to him with my criticism, which he didn't reply to.)

Actually he has addressed this, and the answer is relatively little. Most wealth in the world is passed down from one generation to the next, growing at a rate faster than the economy in general. Many of the richest families in the world from centuries ago are still the richest families. Other than in small pockets of the world, like silicon valley, new money is pretty rare.

Some thoughts: While working in finance I was able to talk to many people who's work was related to economics. Employees at banks and brokerages, governments and regulator bodies. Most had heard of Piketty, and many agreed with his basic premises (r>g, and all it entails). His reach actually surprised me.

But I also had contact with academics, and like the article said, it's not so much that academics are refuting Piketty, but that they simply aren't studying the same problems that he is talking about. From what I've been told, a lot of academic work in economics is focused on incredibly unique and specific problems. It isn't "fashionable" to be studying something so broad and perhaps abstract as inequality.

I use Visual Studio and I don't see that changing. Do you think it's worthwhile for me to learn to use Vim? Does using VsVim give you the same capabilities as regular Vim? And does using it take away any Visual Studio Capabilities?

How much time are you giving them to prepare an answer?

If a senior member of the company scheduled a meeting and then asked me on the spot what I would improve about the company I wouldn't be able to give any good ideas.

If instead they sent me a note saying that in three days they would like to meet with me for twenty minutes, and that during this time they would like to hear my thoughts so far about working for the company and to please think about ways in which you think the company can improve. I would be able to provide many ideas in this scenario.

You mention that needless regulations are bad. Matt Levine [1] has an interesting theory on regulations: (paraphrased)

1. There are two types of regulations:

- Custom Regulations (smart, particular, specific)

- Bulk Regulations (generic red tape, not reasoned or desired)

2. All regulations are custom regulations.

3. All discussion (like your point) is about bulk regulations, which do not exist.

Regulation is tough. Everything that you believe to be needless, may actually serve a very specific and important purpose.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-24/metrics-f...

I think "team fit" as you've described is probably the most important factor for me. But it's a really tough thing to interview for / create within a team.

I had a coworker who could be described as a 'social butterfly', someone who can talk to anyone for hours on end and make them feel comfortable. They would spend half an hour with each interview candidate, not asking any technical questions, but just having a friendly conversation. Then they would give a 'yes/no' opinion of whether we should hire the candidate. All of their preferred hires were very successful and fit in with the team. It was remarkable. Some people are just excellent at reading others. Most people really aren't sadly.

It's funny how after all the work that went into this he still ends up with a CV Profile with two grammatical errors!

I guess the final version is better? It's definitely more joyful, but also longer and less direct which I'm not sure is a good thing.

Of course. It's an average. Also included in that average are girls who get a $1000 weave twice a year plus monthly cuts, coloring and styling. And I'm guessing the product is catered more towards the second group.

Some anecdotal data that might surprise you then: A good friend of mine gets her hair cut once a month and says with tip it's about $100. Then coloring a few times a year at $200 a pop, then lots on shampoo, conditioner, hair products, new hairdryer and brushes every few years. She's spent over $1000 for a weave multiple times in her life.

She's of course at one end of the spectrum, but $240 on average a year doesn't surprise me that much.

He's be no means a hero to me, but you do raise interesting points.

I'm really not sure if Rockefeller gave more than he took. That's a tough question to answer. Is a world without Standard Oil, but also without his incredibly vast and important array of philanthropic works a better one? I don't think I can make this argument. Many aspects of modern medicine, public sanitation, public health, and public education are all in debt to his charitable work. Did those not improve the world more than his anti-competitive business practices hurt it?

Globalresearch also publishes 9/11 truther articles and chem-trail articles. They are not a valid source.

I agree that the $400 million seems ridiculous. But it's interesting that you mention black colleges, because David Rockefeller's grandfather started the General Education Board [0] - one of the first and most important factors in developing black education in the United States.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Education_Board

All of the Rockefeller money was distributed by John D. Rockefeller Sr. directly to his children and grandchildren. While progressive in some aspects, he held the common at the time view that business matters were best left to men. This resulted in the men of the family receiving sizable ($billions) gifts, while the women mainly lived on allowances, and much smaller gifts. I'm sure this is part of it.

In addition to this, there really is an almost fetish-like following behind the ideas that the Rockefeller's in particular secretly 'rule' or 'ruin' the world.

John D. Rockefeller Sr. stated many times that he believed that it was God's plan for him to: (paraphrasing)

1) Acquire as mush wealth as he could through business. 2) Donate this money to help humanity in the best ways possible.

And he did exactly that. And he did better than anyone else ever has. He didn't do much else. The Rockefeller's are fascinating people, but I think most of us would be surprised as to how little of the 'world-dominating' stuff is true.

It's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but "Titan: The Life Of John D. Rockefeller" goes into incredible detail on the family. You may not leave with a nice picture of the family, but definitely a different one than some of the comments in this thread. A lot of the private journals and business documents have actually been released to the public and it makes for a fascinating read.

I'm ignorant about David Rockefeller as well. And it may be right to criticize David. But the parent comment was actually talking about events related to John D. Rockefeller's philanthropy, not David's. John D. Rockefeller did not pass on his wealth to his Son, let alone his grandson until after the events mentioned.

edit: for example: David was not even born when the Flexner report was released.

I finished this a few nights ago. What a book. It took about 4 times as long to read as Steve Jobs, but it was absolutely worth it. Someone like John D. Rockefeller really is one in a billion. Highly Recommended.

I finished "Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller" a few nights ago. It's a mammoth of a book and I believe the undisputed most accurate and comprehensive look at his life.

I think that what you've written here is incredibly misleading when talking about John D. Rockefeller's philanthropy in particular. It is wrong to imply the Rockefeller's secretly controlled strings in order to make profits from their donations. Time and time again he gave away vast sums of money and did everything in his power to separate himself completely from the donation. His largest fear about donating was that the public would label his donation as tainted money. He wanted no influence over, and never visited with most of the receivers of his donations. His only concern was that institutions should not be wholly dependent on his philanthropy, and work to raise money from other sources as well.

The Rockefeller institute for Medical Research is one of the most successful examples of philanthropy ever. And Rockefeller may only be eclipsed by Bill Gates as the greatest philanthropist ever.

You can absolutely (and should) criticize his business practices, but Rockefeller literally created the model of what a successful philanthropist should do.