Haven't seen any business school professors chime in yet, so as one I'll do so: Increasingly, what "elite" undergraduate schools offer at the graduate level is less valuable than what research universities offer. The best professors are sequestered in individual labs or in large research universities, not in schools valued for ratings that are focused on undergraduates. The best educations are provided by people who understand learning and make themselves available to assist in the process - nothing about Harvard, Wharton, Tuck, etc. is better suited than University of California, University of Texas, NYU, many other state universities to perform those tasks. Furthermore, and it might deserve an entirely separate post, but many of the best professors in business are being bought up by Asian business schools. I think the net result is the American business school experience is both more valuable in terms of the topics covered and less valuable in terms of the educational experience than it once was.
"The best professors are sequestered in individual labs or in large research universities"
I don't think this applies to most MBA subjects, as least as much as it does the others. It's a highly applied and contemporary discipline, perhaps one of the least theoretical.
My best Finance prof, for example, who taught us Private Equity / VC, had personal relationships with so many of the best funds. He spends a lot of time in the field, staying in tune with trends in the industry. He was able to bring in really bright minds from the field, and it always made for the most engaging material.
Even advanced corporate finance with all the cases like Volkswagen and their amazing currency trading activities ... it's all very much the real world material.
A quick side note - NYU is private (and generally seen as elite at the undergrad level, with the price tag to match), not a state university. The state schools in New York are the SUNY (State University of New York) system outside of the city, and the CUNY (City University of New York) system inside the city.
I think you should re-examine the notion that toxic workplaces in tech (particularly w/r/t sexism) result from forces entirely unrelated to the behavior of "actual" computer nerds.
So I can't provide a strictly bank-oriented response, but blockchain is just a distributed ledger system. I think some disservice is done in not clearly separating out the functions of blockchain from those of cryptocurrencies. You could use blockchain to manage property, contracts, microtransactions, data commerce, file storage, or certification, to name a few things. I think it's mostly a question of what can be fit into the ledger framework. Some people think that various local networks and other functionalities in the Internet of Things could be a testing ground for its broader uses (e.g., managing ownership of smart devices). Blockstack envisions it as kind of a backbone for a new Internet browsing paradigm, leveraging blockchain as a sort of DNS replacement if memory serves correctly. It's unclear if any of these ideas will take off in the near term.
Going back to these blockchain applications being separate from cryptocurrencies, to me Ethereum is a step away from the coupling of the two, because it is designed with contracts in mind rather than just money. And a number of folks have signed on to developing systems that leverage Ethereum - take a look at the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Still I suspect that given the fact that it's unproven, the actual investment made in personnel and capital by these firms is low. Also, the ironic counterpoint to this view is that Ethereum also has ETH, a cryptocurrency. I'm an investor in ETH, but even so, I am not sure what it is worth at this point, since the value of Ethereum seems to lie not in currency but in other applications of the blockchain.
Except the examples you give demonstrate two widely divergent use cases - public and private. If you are managing an internal database, you don't need proof of work. You need concurrent conflict resolution. Every major database right now has such faculties built in and you don't need to spend megawatts of power to maintain it.
In the public dns replacement use case there is promise and potential, but it has the laundry list of problems you would need to solve to make it happen. I look forward to the attempts, of course, because traditional dns is a brittle top down nightmare of exploitable corruption and manipulation.
But still, blockchains as they are are only useful when you don't trust participants. And for along large-scale application, making that claim puts you in a political position - either you trust or distrust the governments oversight of whatever you are trying to reach consensus on. While a lot of people will, at inquiry, say they don't trust the government, very few people are willing to put the effort into forging an alternative public trust framework for things like property rights or certification that you mentioned.
I agree with you that the public use case makes more sense than the private one, though really I feel that it's not about "public" or "private" but rather about different sides in some market, whether it is public or private.
But I'm not sure I understand, were any of those use cases "private?" When I mentioned "manage property, contracts, microtransactions, data commerce, file storage, or certification, to name a few things", I think pretty much all of those besides file storage (on which I'd defer to Blockstack) represent agreements or exchanges between different sides in a market or platform.
For what it's worth, Ross Ulbricht also paid to have 5 people killed. (They of course were not killed, because it was part of the larger sting, but that's irrelevant to his repugnant behavior)
From the story I've vaguely heard, he considered them ideologically defensible. But, at that point I guess it's not particularly civil. (or maybe I missed the meaning of the word "civil" here)
The investigators scamming him doesn't change the fact that he did it. Additionally, there were two instances where he paid to have someone "killed". While the second case is rather sketchy, the first case is much clearer. They even staged the murder for him.
I work on several DARPA programs and agree with most of this. But some programs are by design far more basic or applied than others. Also worth noting - DARPA generally doesn't pay contractors anything like what the private sector pays employees.
The programs (and their vision, and their success) depend quite a bit on the PM, and on their ideas and engagement. To a lesser extent success depends upon the SETAs as well.
> DARPA generally doesn't pay contractors anything like what the private sector pays employees.
Eh. You can get like a $200/hr rate. If you're a small company with low overhead, you can get paid quite competitively with the private sector in base comp. Difficult to match big G stock grants, though, no one is becoming a millionaire off of this work.
Unless of course what you do on the grant can be turned into a billion dollar company, because (generally) contractors walk away from research programs with liberal rights to the IP they create, with the government retaining some rights to use, but very rarely (IME) retaining direct ownership. Of course, it's probably not that likely that what you do can turn into a billion dollar company but hey, one can dream...
