You’re just regurgitating conservative talking points that don’t align with reality. The California economy is the largest in the USA, by a significant margin, and its economic growth over the last 15 years far outpaced the U.S national average. California is on track to overtake Germany as the world’s 4th largest economy.
Also, don't Californians move to other states for the same reason expats move to Costa Rica or Thailand? Because they are much richer than the locals, so they can have an outsized lifestyle for their money. Coming in and outbidding for the nicest houses certainly doesn't sound like refugees fleeing a collapsing government. I don't understand how people can see that and think people are "escaping".
since we live on Terra, it has always had by definition terra-form, but if you use it to mean "make it support more humans inasmuch as we think we know how to do that", are you saying we're making it better or worse, unintentionally?
or are you just using it to mean "making planet-scale changes"?
It sounds like you’ve had success with this approach. Is this what you do for a living or just invest on the side? My issue is that I have a day job and have limited time to do sufficient research to feel confident with any investment decision aside from using index funds and the like.
Yes, the people who disagree are those pumping and dumping and the bag holders.
And cryptocurrency mining consumes as much electricity annually as the country of Argentina. Country scale emissions is not at all negligible, particularly in light of catastrophic global warming.
I respectfully disagree. When a politician and party are inciting violence, encouraging a coup, and undermining the foundations of democracy then I think we’ve crossed over the line from needing to be accepting of different views.
Privacy aligns with Apple’s revenue model (selling hardware) but not with Facebook’s (selling ads). This is the only reason you should have faith that Apple will work to protect your privacy, while Facebook will work to undermine it.
I don't believe this for a second. Apple's largest revenue growth has been in services, and they are sitting on a trove of data. They have a million bad incentives.
Honestly I can't believe we're even having this discussion. It's like Google all over again.
Apple says "trust us" but gives us no way to verify the trust. Trust without verification is a long-term recipe for disaster.
Everyone says that Apple’s business is selling hardware but that’s changing. Apple Music, Apple TV, iCloud storage and their commission on app sales are all clear software incentives. Yes, they’re still dominated by hardware sales but it’s obvious they are interested in diversifying.
Tell that to Theranos, Fyre Festival, WeWork, the counterfeiters on Amazon, the myriad of shady ICOs, and on and on. Unfortunately, scammers are rife in industry. Let's not fool ourselves.
Your examples seem to support the point you were replying to. Theranos is a perfect example of a scam unravelling because eventually the scammer needs to produce results, and not just self-referential research papers that never quite go anywhere.
I wonder how many more years it will take for uBeam to give up the ghost. Dave Jones has so thoroughly dismantled that one, it should have been over years ago.
There's a sucker born every minute and a skilled con man can exploit that unfortunate truism to keep a scam for quite a while. Moller's skycar is an example of a flagrant scam that lasted for decades.
I provided several top of mind examples. It doesn't take long to think of entire industries that are shady, from payday lenders to cigarette companies.
> In industry you _eventually_ need to show result and earn money
> It doesn't take long to think of entire industries that are shady, from payday lenders
I trust you aren't arguing that payday lenders don't earn money!
There's a huge difference between "I don't like what this industry is doing" and "this industry is fraudulent, can never produce the goods/services claimed, and will never turn a profit for the investors".
I don't see much of a difference between these companies and the person in the article. Both are taking advantage of a vulnerable population for some personal benefit.
If you have completely terrible credit and have a minor emergency, a payday loan may be your only option. If you take one, you’re supposed to pay it off with your next paycheck or 2, so the interest isn’t that outrageous. It certainly beats losing your job because you can’t drive to work.
The original point was that people scamming investors get discovered because the investors are invested enough to follow up on their claims. Less so in academia.
The immorality of Pay Day is very much known, and it is not relevant because Pay Day is scamming their customers, not their investors.
Both those examples produce bucketloads of cash for their shareholders. They're not defrauding the people who bankrolled them, they're taking advantage of the vulnerable, which is an entirely different problem.
No, both are dependent on cheating people. One cheats people who can fight back, and is thus considered criminal. The other cheats people who cannot fight back, and is profitable.
I think your examples help prove the parent comment's point. Each of those companies faced a reckoning when they weren't able to deliver on their promises.
It is very possible that there will be action against Mr. Neumann. Any court of competent jurisdiction would likely rule that he was in breach of his fiduciary responsibility. There are even richer people who are not happy with him, who can hire even bigger armies of lawyers to make his life hard. I'm guessing they'll wait until they've got the company locked down and him out, then start going after him.
Those aren't necessarily inherent flaws, they're bad execution. Ride-sharing _can_ be very profitable, but it's also supposed to be very low-overhead. SV startups don't do low-overhead.
Electric scooters are a little iffier, as they take significantly more capex and there isn't much data on market acceptance (Or, at least, none of which I know.)
Meal-in-a-box is not a bad idea either; new people are showing up every day whining about how, "Adult-ing is hard." The fact that people eventually "graduate" is not an issue so long as more people are being born. It's just not necessarily something Joe Six-Pack is going to buy.
If you've noticed a common theme here, it's that the idea of hyper-scaling can be flawed. The above all have significantly lower threshold for market saturation than they believe, if you ask me.
Ride-sharing can be successful, but may not take over the world. Electric scooters can be successful, but may not take over the world. Meal-in-a-box can be successful, but may not take over the world.
SV gets stuck in the pareto trap of scaling past economies of scale and to the point where that next 20% of your customer base takes 80% of your capital. You can push scaling, but the market only moves so fast.
Ride sharing is only viable if the market shrug off all the externalities (insurance, traffic management, personal data security, etc) and keep pumping money into it in the hopes of fully autonomous vehicles becoming a reality within the next decade. Indeed if this type of hyperscaling were profitable we should have seen major regional taxi operators like airlines in developed countries a long time go, but alas there never was because it was not a good idea then and now.
Ditto for electric scooters - I rarely see anybody use one but it is somehow already costing my country millions in medical costs.
The housing mortgage crisis, dot com boom and bust, payday loan industry, for-profit universities, fad diet companies, supplements with no scientific basis, cigarette manufacturers... There are whole industries and periods of time where large numbers of shady companies are rising and falling.
This was an issue of bad timing, not a bad business model. People weren't really mentally at the point of buying such thing on-line, and pets.com burnt through their cash so quickly that it couldn't wait for people to start adopting it. As pointed out by others, Amazon made it work; however, they are very smart about diversifying, re-investing, and not being profligate with cash-on-hand.
You forgot Solar Freakin Roadways and the water from air bottle, but yes them and the billionaire banksters who nearly bankrupted most of the world who are the biggest scammers, like Dick Cheney, who didn't serve a day in prison for their crimes. (Too big to fail. -> Too big to jail.)
As an aside, why does nearly every Twitter link take you to a page not found thus requiring a reload? This is a terrible user experience that should be easy to fix.
thanks for this. when they released their new twitter version, i started getting all these pages where it would error out and none of the reload buttons would work. couldn't search the cause for this very well. i can't believe the resolution to this is to force users to reload yet again to load the site... ugh.
Whenever I get that error on my iPhone, I can just press the browsers reload button, and it works. (The reload button displayed on the page does not work)
Oh, when I open Twitter in Firefox on Android tweets fail to load in 95% of the cases, however the Twitter site itself loads fine enough to show me a Retry button I can press to fail at loading the tweet again. All the while accessing via 'app' and even embedded tweets on 3rd-party sites load fine. Can't recall when this started; must have been some time in 2018.
On the desktop (in Firefox also, same addons and addon config too) things always work (as far as that can be said for a site as horribly slow as theirs).
They have been completely below the bar in terms of UX for a long time now, at least for me. They used to have a lean, good/available and fast site, and now they don't.
It's worse than that...they provide a reload button even that does absolutely nothing, requiring you to manually reload the page. With all the money they've spent on engineering, it's mystifying why their system is such a dumpster fire.
Like Amazon is intentionally enabling counterfeiting, Twitter's website is now intentionally broken. Somehow Twitter forgot how to build a functional website.
I've wondered the same thing. It seems to only happen on mobile browsers, and on both iOS and Android. I wonder if people who are logged in are subject to the same?
It seems to happen at least much less often when logged in.
But yes, it is by far the jankiest thing I've ever seen in a supposedly serious tech company. No idea what failure has allowed that to happen for so long, it seems to be a permanent feature at this point.
I always thought this was some sort of rate limiting that twitter applies to visits from aggregators like reddit or hn. I'm not sure how I originally made that assumption, though.
Firefox on iOS simply won’t show me Twitter any more, even in private mode. Always says “something went wrong,” no matter how many times I reload. Oh well, didn’t need it anyway.
I think it has something to do with their cookie requirements. Not too sure, I just stopped opening Twitter links rather than debugging why I couldn't load their contents anymore.
So, a cable television franchise has special protections enumerated in state and federal law.
They use this as a guise to provide internet, while only being responsible for the tv portion.
Additionally, the FCC has specific rules which exempt cable modems from regulation at the municipal level, which is why you see fiber convert back to DOCSIS to attach a cable model at the end.
Oh they do. The most common one is fees for renting a cable modem (which you can avoid by buying, but almost no consumers do). The article cites an "internet cost recovery fee" as well.
Remember, in the US, your TV and internet providers are typically one and the same.
