and that untrusted source could look a lot like his superior's email (boss@c0mpany.com vs boss@company.com)
And depending on the resources of the hacker, the email could be stylised just for him, talking about something important that's (perhaps something bad) happening now and the notBoss is telling him to check this months info, and kindly providing him with a pdf that Mathew hastily opens with his latest version of Adobe Acrobat with a zero day vulnerability that hasn't been discovered yet.
Yeah agreed, combining social engineering with technical exploits and you can get really good results. I almost fell into one trap myself one day: Basically I was having an argument with a service provider, and somehow I received an email talking about the same type of issue (just high level, without the minute details) with a link attached. I had to check it many times to make sure that it was a fraud email...
Presumably he opened an Office document containing macros. Macros are able to execute system commands and load malicious PowerShell code.
Executable files are blocked by pretty much all corporate e-mails systems. Zero-days for PDF viewers are rare. After all, most hacking attacks are things like ransomware campaigns, where everyone is a potential victim and phishing mails are sprayed all over the internet. A zero-day would be burnt pretty quickly.
However, many users legitimately need office macros and also need to open office documents to collaborate with contractors or customers. Many times, the phishing mail comes from a legitimate address because the other company has been compromised already.
The solution would be to only allow signed macros, but depending on the size of the organization, that can be costly.
If every bar and restaurant within 10 miles of me were 100% open for sit-down dining, I'd have eaten in exactly zero of them for the last 6 months, down from probably 50 or more visits plus 20 bar visits in the same period in 2019.
That's a poor anecdotal take on the point. What matters is that if the government makes it impossible, the possibility for everyone is zero, while it would be between 0 and maybe 50% without lockdowns. That's the difference between a business surviving and not.
More-or-less what happened here in Sweden, no lockdowns during the first wave, still most people wouldn't dare going out for eating and drinking. It eased up a little during summer with number of cases falling, after it picked up again in September there was a noticeable drop again without government intervention.
Then in November it was visible that without intervention cases would start to pile up and service business were still suffering due to low patronage, there is no way out of this and government intervention vs no intervention isn't the root cause of the downfall for the service industry, it's pretty clear.
> It would be more honest if predictions like this were mentioned alongside articles in the press that claim lockdowns are the only option we have.
What are the other options? For all of humanity's advancements, quarantine-like behavior is our best bet against novel diseases.
In fact, many governments only implemented half-assed "soft" lockdowns. They should have acted immediately and decisively. Lockdown early and hard, at the very first signs that this thing was becoming a pandemic. And don't let go until it's under control.
Instead, we got this lame lockdown-but-not-quite (places of worship open, are you serious?), no mask mandate, nothing. And as soon as things start to look better, reopen. Oops, bad again, close. And now are are only prolonging the suffering.
Developing countries are once again in a bad shape, but richer countries should know better. Treat this as a war, support your citizens. Even though large companies like airlines are important, most of the focus should have been towards small businesses and individuals. Also on PPE at the very beginning.
There is enough money in the developed world to help with the problem. Make some fewer F-35 (at 200M a pop) if need be. That's a lot of food and rent money.
The coronavirus is not entirely novel. Researchers report people who had a case of SARS-CoV-1 have t-cells that recognize SARS-CoV-2.
By the time the COVID-19 was recognized as a distinct virus, it was already too late to do anything about it, except to start distributing Vitamin D and other useful nutrient to the vulnerable.
> There is enough money in the developed world to help with the problem
Money is a useful fiction, nothing more. Money allows people to trade their time. Telling large numbers of people they can’t do anything with their time destroys exponentially more wealth than it protects.
That's not true though. Even if the government does nothing you still have people altering their behavior out of fear. More online shopping, working from home, less traveling, activities outside the home. Looking at Sweden where they didn't lock down, I would say that seems a very large part of the change in economic activity.
And because the virus tends to get more out of control, this change is magnified compared to when the government takes action. Is it really better for the economy over the long term to lockdown or not? I don't think we know the answer one way or the other.
To take the extreme example. China was the epicenter of the pandemic, took the strongest government action and snuffed it out. Now our economy suffers while theirs does much better. Maybe our problem is we couldn't be as extreme as them, we don't have a hope of eliminating it in our countries in the West through lockdowns.
There’s so many assumptions and ignored aspects in this discussion. Whether it be the effectiveness of mitigation strategies, respect for individual rights, costs of lost years of education for 10s of millions of kids and how that affects their lives, cost to business that are destroyed forever more, health consequences due to shuttering inside, mental health consequences, the list goes on...
We’re told all of this is in our best interest by rich people who will not suffer much cost if any - most politicians may come out ahead financially.
I've seen anecdotal claims that attendance at restaurants and theaters has been way down even in states or regions that had no restrictions. Would be interesting to see some actual data for this.
I am someone who went through (fully legal) immigration hell while building a company that in the end, employed 100s of US workers and had global competition (meaning, if we didn't do it in the US the jobs would probably go to some other country).
Here's my conclusion from this experience: if you are in a business that depends on Intellectual Property competes globally (i.e. not a nail salon hiring local workers), then in the area that gives you your competitve advantage YOU NEED TO HIRE THE BEST GLOBAL TALENT. Period.
If the immigration system doesn't allow that, then either you'll hire remote, or you'll be beaten by an international competitor with more liberal skilled immigration rules. Neither is a great outcome.
There are simple ways to ensure H1-B is used to hire this type of talent. The recent rules that prioritize H1-B applicants based on their salary are positive IMO and address a lot of the Tata/Infosys abuse (which is real). If you are truly going after the best global talent, that won't be cheap!
H1-B is super old school. The notion is that you only hire someone in H1-B if there's nobody that can do the job. However, the challenge today is not if you can do the job, but can you do it better than the global competitors? That concept is super foreign to immigration legislation (no pun intended :).
Short of a whole new immigration framework, increasing the number of H1-Bs and prioritizing based on salary would be a good short term fix - no lawsuits needed.
That's true, but there are many ways to "serve the nation". Note that a foreigner who comes to work in a country will also be a tax payer, the same way a US citizen is. In addition, given the barriers to entry, they might be more qualified than the equivalent "native" employee (since the company is willing to pull the extra effort). They might become citizens after some time as well. Also, if you make it hard to hire necessary talent from abroad (as is the case in the US, and to a lesser extent in Europe as well), you end up making your own companies weaker in the process.
But we know how the system is used today, not in the hypothetical: to hire 30-40% cheaper, and to hire people that, for years, will have fewer rights than citizens.
That is not always true: top tier companies like FB (the subject of this article), Google pay internationals the same as locals. As for the issue of rights I fully agree: much better to instead give foreigners much more security when they immigrate in terms of visas.
Can you elaborate on what do you mean by "or to hire a tax payer"? If you hire the best person overseas and bring them to the US to work via immigration process, that person becomes a tax payer to the US, no?
Talent and skill development also happen in the workplace... so requiring U.S. companies to hire U.S. workers serves the nation. We see a similar issue in academia, where top programs have a huge cohort of foreign students - students who are likely to take the knowledge gained (at institutions built in part through decades of public funding) back to their home countries (understandably).
The US is incredibly lucky that so many of the smartest people in the world come to do research at its universities. Most countries would love to be in that position. Cutting off that immigration in order to "serve the nation" would be incredibly short-sighted.
> students who are likely to take the knowledge gained (at institutions built in part through decades of public funding) back to their home countries (understandably).
Or, if they're allowed to, remain in the US and contribute to its continued technological and scientific dominance. Even if they eventually leave the US, they don't just soak up knowledge while they're in the US. Most actual research is done by graduate students, for relatively meager pay. The US has a continual influx of extremely smart people who are willing to work relatively cheaply to keep American research institutions at the forefront of scientific research. How is this a bad deal for the United States?
I was talking about academia, which is why I said "scientific research."
What SV is doing is perpetuating US dominance in software (and some hardware development fields). If most of the skilled software engineers in the world become off-limits to SV companies, then the global software industry will cease to be so heavily concentrated in SV.
It's strange and amusing to see people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year complaining about foreigners undercutting their salaries. They imagine that if immigration is restricted, then the open jobs will go to Americans. The reality is that the jobs will leave. Aesop must have written a fable about this sort of situation.
It's possible for both the US and China/India to benefit. The US gets a massive yearly influx of extremely smart students, many (maybe most) of whom want to remain in the US. Even if they do eventually return, they work for US research labs while they're getting their degrees. China and India eventually get some of the students back, now with increased skills.
But it's not as if China and India are in control of this process. Unless they're going to take the drastic step of preventing young people from leaving, it's not up to them to say how many students go to the US. They do increasingly try to get students to return, and any increase in xenophobia or restrictions on immigration in the US will make that easier.
That's not quite true in my opinon. Take your example of academia. Many students will chose to stay in the US after (if they can, because salaries tend to be higher than in many other countries) rather than depart. Also, instead of "taking" knowledge, they might actually create some new knowledge. Think about how many brilliant professors in US universities were once foreign post-docs there. If the US chooses to close its borders to this sort of talent, it will considerably weaken itself in the longer term against countries enacting more rational immigration policies.
And many students choose to return to their origin countries... some of these countries are even exerting influence on our academic institutions, e.g., China’s “Confucius Institute” model. If you think that’s in the interest of the U.S. you’re being willfully ignorant.
That's not what I said. Yes, some students (a small minority) will be acting in the interests of other countries. Overall, the US is a net winner in terms of benefits vs costs of foreign students. This is one of the reasons many colleges are currently under strong financial strain: no international students to pay the bills. Would you rather close borders to all foreign students?
Maybe. American working class students have been priced out of many top academic programs, yet foreign students continued to pile in, solidifying the prohibitive cost of these programs. How is that a good thing? I’m personally happy to see these institutions struggle... they clearly need to find a way to serve more than the wealthy elite here and abroad.
Country X gets the top students from country X, the US gets the top students from the world!
That smart TA from X European country helping American undergrads on that problem set? He's not helping undergrads from his country. He's not publishing papers that would boost his country's schools either.
One might ask if the lab he works at would even exist without foreign grad students! Would there be enough native applicants to staff it?
Graduate school isn't a zero sum game. It's an ecosystem and ecosystems have a huge network effect.
We're in a bad position today - but we should be aware that an under-investment in education and other social services has caused our tax payers to not be the best candidates.
Would love a citation on this one. Forcing above average American students into cram schools to memorize leetcode problems would probably help make Americans “the best candidates” for the whiteboard merry-go-round, but I have a strange feeling interviews would start morphing again if that happened.
American students are very reluctant to study stem compared to most rich countries so USA wouldn't be able to compete with the rest of the world without importing talent.
So the choice is to let companies import talent or see them move to another country.
They're already outsourcing the jobs to other countries because of cost regardless of talent level.
If the US did away with the H1B visa entirely, companies here would hire people they would have previously overlooked and train them to be as competent as what they would have hired abroad.
Facebook already trains people, they hire a ton of inexperienced people every year and train them to become software engineers. All they require is that you are smart/hard working enough to pass their tests.
> prioritizing based on salary would be a good short term fix
You have to remember that H1-Bs are used for many occupations and industries outside of tech. Prioritizing by salary only effectively means that 99% of all H1-Bs would go to 3-4 large companies.
Yes, nurses, doctors, etc may not get paid as much as a FAANG engineer a couple of years out of college, but they are still often needed.
I think that if you want to prioritize by salary within industries that could potentially work, but then you're bordering on a "new immigration framework".
I'm not saying that they shouldn't get paid more, and I'm also not saying that people in tech should get paid less.
But tying it to only salary doesn't create a balanced system.
There are occupations that are understaffed and have a need for foreign skilled workers that simply can not practically match what a FAANG engineer gets paid.
"should be paid more" doesn't mean anything in the US or any society based in capitalism. With capitalism it's mostly supply, demand, leverage, and a few others. Compensation isn't connected to moral obligation.
And specifically FAANG engineer's price is established in a free market where as nurses and doctors are protected by licensure which drives their price above the natural market rate.
There are plenty of doctors on H1Bs. The Midwest is full of them and they command high salaries. At any rate, different job categories can have different requirements. I know soccer coaches that are H1Bs. These are coaches who train elite junior teams for example. Musicians, theatre all works the same way.
> The Midwest is full of them and they command high salaries.
Yes, they do, but that does not mean they will beat out what FAANG is able to pay an engineer if H1-Bs are granted based solely on salary.
> At any rate, different job categories can have different requirements.
I'm not sure what you mean by this, but if you mean different salary requirements, then that effectively goes away if you start granting H1-Bs based solely on salary.
> Musicians, theatre all works the same way.
This is... kind of my point? I seriously doubt that these musicians and artists are being paid comparably to a SF-based FAANG engineer. If they are, they are more-likely-than-not qualified for an O-1 anyways, so the point is kind of moot.
I don't understand this comment. The justice department alleges that Facebook went out of its way to hide jobs from Americans bc there is a power imbalance that favors the employer of an immigrant worker. This wasn't about hiring better talent, but about hiring talent that you can underpay while still retaining. As a side effect, qualified Americans were harmed.
These allegations may or may not be true but I fail to see how your framing addresses the complaint.
I agree that forcing higher pay for visa holders helps to align incentives.
The idea that FB wants to underpay any employee is preposterous. You are aware that FB & Google pay 2x other companies such as Microsoft and Amazon?
If you join tech companies such as FB, Google, Amazon or MSFT as an H-1B immigrant, if your performance is good they want to keep you, so they sponsor you for greencard. Once an employee gets a greencard he/she is free to leave the company, so if the goal is to underpay you want to NOT sponsor for greencard.
As part of sponsoring an employee for greencard you have to post an advertisement for the position the employee is already doing a good job in, so most employers see this as a formality and don't recruit as vigorously as they would for a position that is actually open. This should be expected, and the problem is the stupid rule, not the companies. The rules need to be changed to advertise before the position is given to an H-1B candidate, not afterwards.
> if your performance is good they want to keep you, so they sponsor you for greencard
I think this is an important factor that shouldn't be ignored. An employer can not choose to keep you on an H1-B forever. That status will expire after 7 years, at which point you are either leaving, or have already begun the PERM process.
In my opinion, the well being of taxpayers should take precedence over a relatively small number of gov't workers.
Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period. If gov't employees don't like it, they should quit and find another job like everyone else.
In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider. There was an article here at HNews a few weeks ago about a study that pointed out people making $75/hr in the tunnels to do more or less nothing.
Why do we care about the well being of few thousand workers over millions of taxpayers, many of whom make less than the gov't / union employees? makes no sense.
Yet this very site thinks paying these wages to Google interns is just fine. I have 4 decades of experience and deliver products that make $100M a year and I don't get paid these salaries because I don't work for a FAANG company, nor live in NY or SF, and am quite happy with what I make because the cost of living is reasonable and I like it here.
The median union worker does not make $400,000 a year in any city in the US. Picking extremes and calling it the norm is just picking facts to promote an opinion.
Whether you support or dislike unions in general is no reason to argue without useful facts to allow for reasoned discussion. This isn't Reddit.
I doubt that Google interns are making $200K-300K/yr.
Even if they were, I grant companies far greater leeway to set the wages that make sense for them, with the only control being whether I'm willing to shop there and/or hold their shares. Government salaries should be subject to greater public scrutiny than corporate compensation, IMO.
The only thing that needs to happen for government workers is removal of defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare. Once those fudge-able numbers are removed from the equation, the overpaying by promising future taxpayer money will automatically stop.
The real cost of those benefits decades into the future aren’t properly reflected in government budgets. It allows politicians to promise lavish benefits who need the votes from the government employee unions, and then the costs get understated, or just straight up ignored since who is going to force the government to set aside money for the future? End result is people today paying for labor performed decades ago, and not allowing for proper pricing of government labor compared to private sector.
For proof, check your local and state government pension plans reports. And note that those numbers are optimistic by at least 30% (compared to how the government forces private employers to value defined benefit pension liabilities).
> In my opinion, the well being of taxpayers should take precedence over a relatively small number of gov't workers.
Pay and treat public workers like shit, especially in high-demand high-skill professions, and good luck trying to recruit and retain anyone even semicompetent.
> Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period.
Government usually pays well-below-market salaries, and still-below-market total comp, which is why it disproportionately attracts people who either prefer stability of the particular style of benefit structure it provides, who have a strong preference for a particular field of endeavor unique to the public sector, or who simply can't hack it in the private sector.
> In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider.
Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.
> when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up
Or it's the inefficiency that you get when you can't recruit and retrain the best workers, especially in management and knowledge-worker positions, because the best workers can make much more money in the private sector.
> Government usually pays well-below-market salaries
That may be true for base salaries, but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case. If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse; however that's not happening. I know from personal experience people that get government jobs and act like they won the lottery.
> Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.
In NYC at least, public projects like subway construction use by law or by convention only union labor. That's a huge cost driver. You are right that that's private unions when it comes to construction, however when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up and resisting any modernization that would make the system more efficient.
You are also right that contractor oversight sucks and that's also a cost driver; both are valid issues.
> > Government usually pays well-below-market salaries
> That may be true for base salaries,
That's specifically what the phrase you quoted refers to.
> but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case.
It's still below market, though not as much. As I said in the next phrase in the same sentence from the one you quoted.
> If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse
No, if what I said was true, government would (as I said, again, in the same sentence you pulled the quote from) disproportionately end up employing those with noncompensation reasons to choose the particular work, and those of below average competence. Which it does. Government employees would only quit en masse if the below-market pay was a sudden transition from at-market pay.
Something you may not have considered - in countries where public servants are paid poorly, the result is widespread government corruption. In Nicaragua, for example, the police are so badly underfunded that if you want their help, you may be asked to pay for the gasoline to run their cars. If you can't pay, you don't get help.
This type of behaviour is massively wasteful and a drain on the wealth of a country. It's wise to avoid it.
Given that it's a relatively small number of employees, you're saving what, a couple cents a year by putting all these workers at minimum wage or lower and forcing them to work for tips?
Unions are not why building things in America is expensive. Its orders of magnitude cheaper to build things in France, a country with extremely strong unions.
Unions as implemented in the US are absolutely part of the problem. They have an adversarial relationship with management and are frequently (seemingly always) corrupt.
Corruption in union leadership is defined as cooperating with management instead of cooperating with workers, i.e. the union. That’s literally the problem. And there’s an objective history of why it happens in the US. See: AFL-CIO pact, Taft-Hartley Act, Cold War, McCarthyism, etc.
French workers weren’t necessarily upset with the Soviets after the war. ;)
The subtitle starts like this: "Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up."
This is clearly written by someone that has little to no startup experience. As someone that has spent 15 years as a founder I can tell you that the opposite is true: I have seen startups racking in seemingly endless funding only to be beaten by much smaller / less well funded competitors that happened to have better strategy or execution. The examples are endless, more recently we heard about Quibi ($2B funding!) failing, Yik Yak, WeWork etc
There are markets that are capital intensive, and others that are really commodity spaces where winner takes all (Uber comes to mind) but for the most part, the smartest VCs in the industry will tell you that you should worry about strategy and execution, not raising a ton of cash which creates a bunch of problems on its own.
This depends on the market structure. If your competitive advantage is product/market fit, it matters how you run the startup. If you are selling a commodity at a loss in order to acquire a market share, all that matters is the depth of your pockets.
And, well, if your competitive advantage is access to legislators to carve out special legal exemptions for yourself [0], good luck competing with that, mom-and-pop startup.
You're free to dislike prop 22, but what you're describing is really nothing like what actually happened.
The special carve-out in this scenario was AB5, which was specifically designed to target Uber & Lyft (effectively every other industry you can imagine was made exempt from it).
And the "access to legislators" was non-existent, that is literally the point of ballot propositions. Apparently these companies tried to work with legislatures first but they were unwilling to compromise. But anyone with a few signatures can put up a ballot prop in California without any special connections, and that's what they did. It was then approved by a majority of voters, it's hard to frame that as some kind of shady backroom deal.
Lastly, it's pretty hard to imagine a mom-and-pop startup this might hurt. It hurts the legacy taxi industry but that is the very type of intrenched interest with their own special rules and special access to legislators that we're better off without. Any new rideshare or delivery app competitors get all the benefits of prop 22 that incumbents do.
This is true, except that the "selling commodity at a loss" and "legal exemptions" examples both presuppose that you already have product-market fit for the commodity you're selling or the thing you're getting an exemption for. If people fundamentally don't want what you're selling, aggressive pricing and legal lobbying will only lead to you killing yourself that much faster.
This is something we tend to take for granted with already-successful companies, but there was a time when everyone — even Uber and DoorDash — were struggling in obscurity to build something people would use.
Maybe? Car services and taxi services kind of already validated product market fit long before Uber, lyft, etc.
While yes, they have some benefits that people like, but it's not clear that those services would have been able to compete against existing services without heavily subsidizing to undercut existing market players.
By "legislators" do you mean members of government? You linked to a California proposition, which any citizen can create:
"In a special election held on October 10, 1911, California became the 10th state to adopt the
initiative process. That year, Governor Hiram Johnson began his term by promising to give
citizens a tool they could use to adopt laws and constitutional amendments without the support
of the Governor or the Legislature. The new Legislature put a package of constitutional
amendments on the ballot that placed more control of California politics directly into the hands of
the people. This package included the ability to recall elected officials, the right to repeal laws by
referendum, and the ability to enact state laws by initiative."[0]
The article describes in detail how the WeWork saga decimated the coworking industry, but you don't care because that doesn't match your experience and you don't depend on coworking spaces. That is really cold.
I've been working with startups part or full time since 1991 and am amazed at how disruptive they are to the markets in which they participate. Getting a huge pool of money and then spending it to achieve dominance in the shortest possible time does lots of damage to markets, in particular in makes the bootstrapping path nearly impossible since customers can't compete with investors.
Are you arguing that WeWork hasn't outcompeted any other office space leasing companies thanks to its funding? The article revolves around testimony from firms that WeWork beat.
Also, even if we assume WeWork is an aberration, "beat" here is on a long timescale, after all. There are by now plenty of tech companies that have been around more than a decade having never made a profit. At some point you have to accept that the market dumping these firms are engaging in, does in fact lead to less well capitalised firms being unable to compete.
Ehh, of all the industries that exist in the world, I find it pretty unlikely that the office space industry is going to be monopolized by a company that is price dumping, and that this is going to put everyone else in the office space industry out of business.
Fair point. Given their business model, it seems like the whole segment of co-working (renting long term leases and reselling as short term ones) never really made sense to begin with. (Despite it being to many people's advantage, including myself).
I wonder if it has more of a place in a post Covid world? At least some companies are interested in divesting themselves of office space and going 100% remote. A flexible office space arrangement or even just a small space that can be rented to meet with clients sounds like it could be useful.
I'd say they aren't enforced because they are really vague and thus hard to enforce, and if they weren't, all sorts of things would be different and weird. For instance Google might not exist (the search engine) because for the first few years of its life it was basically giving the web search engine away for free and hoping to make money by selling search appliances for intranets. That business plan didn't work out and they eventually pivoted to making money on the main search engine.
But what if they'd not been allowed to do this and been forced to charge for web search from day one? With no ad network and without being allowed to take VC money to build up traffic, they'd not have been able to establish a market for ads and thus, would have had to rely entirely on revenue from search appliances, which was tiny. Search would have ended up dominated by their competitors simply because they could never bootstrap themselves to the point where they'd be interesting to advertisers.
So this stuff is complex and even though there seems to clearly be a problem here with VC money subsidising broken businesses forever that suck all the oxygen out of the room, it's unclear that governments effectively setting prices is better (after all, setting price floors is a form of price control). SoftBank will eventually run out of money unless Son finds another Alibaba. Government controls don't run out like that.
> unless Son finds another Alibaba. Government controls don't run out like that.
Thanks, you made me think. You might be right. An unsubstantiated part of me wants to think that oil being pegged to the dollar and the dollar being pegged to nothing is the ultimate root cause. What allows western aligned funds like Softbank to accumulate so much mis-managed money that WeWork is even a thing. I feel like this whole thing will collapse and Bitcoin will look honest in comparison.
Well, oil is traded in dollars but not pegged to it. To be pegged to it, there'd have to be a constant oil price but the price floats freely.
SoftBank is something of an aberration caused by the growth of China. Son would have lost all his wealth in the first dotcom bubble but he sprayed so much money around he got in on Alibaba early, and it turned into the Chinese Amazon. Or at least, that's the uncharitable view. The charitable view is that placing a lot of bets on a lot of firms and hoping one gets huge is a perfectly valid strategy to create wealth, and Son reaped the rewards. However, the risk involved is huge. Lots of people lost lots in the dot com bubble because they sprayed money around and did not find that magic lottery ticket.
Chiming in, as a founding member of a venture backed startup, the idea that our success is guaranteed strictly because of the capital investment is honestly a bit insulting. If only that were true, I wouldn't have to worry about half of my compensation being worthless — a statistical likelihood.
> the idea that our success is guaranteed strictly because of the capital investment is honestly a bit insulting
Nobody but you has that idea. The article is a story about other companies who have maybe shown indications that some can "run amok" with an influx of capital, at the expense of all other stakeholders, including the user.
This article is not a story about you or the non-corporal entity you are birthing and even pretending for a minute that it is, is just silly.
This isn't about your success, it is about the failure of others. WeWork is dying a protracted death, but it did a huge amount of damage to coworking providers before it blew up. You seem to be arguing that disrupting markets is okay as long as failure eventually happens, but that dynamic causes a lot of suffering and waste.
> I have seen startups racking in seemingly endless funding only to be beaten by much smaller / less well funded competitors that happened to have better strategy or execution
The usual rags-to-riches feel-good story.
Reality is more nuanced, and "worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up" is true most of the times.
It seems like the opposite cliché of "Endless VC funding leads to success over better alternatives" is just as much of a fantasy.
After all, people with little marketing experience on Hacker News often believe a marketing budget is the only thing that separates huge success from complete failure.
Exactly, the number of startups which have failed or never even got a chance to start because they had to compete with an unprofitable VC-backed unicorn is unfathomably greater.
The reason why extreme cases are showcased, is because it fits a certain narrative. We all know what that narrative is - that Covid prevention should take precedence over everything else.
The fact that the prevention is worse than the disease, in terms of economic hardship, depression, deprivation of education, etc; the fact that prevention measures hit poor people and minorities much more than rich people (who can move around and educate their kids in private schools that largerly do not shut down) - these are all inconvenient facts.
At least be honest - say you know lockdowns are horrible for many people that even if they got the disease would be fine (save for the extreme anecdotes!) but we still decide to impose them.
Really hard to have an honest conversation based on facts these days.
Countries that actually are serious close bars not schools. Life is basically normal in Wuhan and New Zealand. Meanwhile Christmas is cancelled this year because Western governments didn't do exactly what China did.
Wuhan's lockdown was extreme however; literally locking people inside their homes. Most western societies will not stand for that.
New Zealand had the advantage of having a huge amount of experience with protecting their biodiversity. I'm willing to bet a lot of that experience was transferrable to this situation.
Nonsense. Everything New Zealand or Taiwan or South Korea or now also Australia has done is public knowledge, very simple, and easily implementable in any developed nation that cares to. Australia had a big second wave surge with anti-social anti-maskers protesting too (not surprisingly most of their press is owned by Murdoch). They took the necessary action, enforced mask rules, got case numbers down to zero. Now they can start to live like normal.
Being an island. Yada yada. Has nothing to do with it. It’s all about the simple actions they took that we could repeat but some people don’t want to because they’ve been conned.
Being anti-mask and knowing it puts others at risk is purely an antisocial behavior. It’s a FU to everyone else. It costs nothing to do, it saves lives, and ironically is what would enable us to be as normal as we possibly can by controlling this thing. Being anti-mask and believing it doesn’t put others at risk is a sign they were conned by a few sociopaths who wanted to exploit this for their own political gain.
You tell them that it's in the noise w.r.t. the danger of being alive - because it is. But instead we have news and social media shouting from the rooftops that everyone is going to die or have some nightmarish long-term effects. All of which are no more significant than the risks people take every day on _purpose_. Driving, hiking, swimming, socializing, getting drunk, etc. Sure it's communicable - we've been happily spreading communicable diseases for millennia that kill people. Nature is cruel. But don't expect society to stop "living" to avoid dying.
>You tell them that it's in the noise w.r.t. the danger of being alive - because it is.
If you remember, this is exactly what China did. It failed because despite how hard you try to tell people that it's nothing to worry about, people will start to realize that hospitals are overrun. Your solution is not only demonstrably poor, but is also how we ended up in this mess. It's a tall order to tell people there's "nothing wrong" while nurses are working 12 hours shifts.
What data is this based on? Can I see the source? I would hate to think you are suggesting actions that would lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people based off nothing but an ignorant opinion.
It's a matter of extrapolating the fatality/damage rates out to everyone on the globe. We take that hit plus a bit of fallout - or we can try to continue dealing with things in the big, long, drawn-out, messy way much of the world has been doing. Sucks both ways. Some people prefer one suck - and others prefer a different suck.
If someone told me that the increased risk of dying from covid is just a part of life and that I should ignore it, I would very much ignore that person's advice on all things going forward. I would also very much not vote for that person.
Covid is additive risk, its additional, controllable risk on top of existing risk. As its controllable and communicable, I choose not to contract it and not to spread it. My spending choices reflect those choices; so do the spending choices of hundreds of thousands of other people. Get the virus under control and lets get the economy back.
Your advice is very much in the nature of 'lets not use seat belts, wear helmets, or masks'
I would argue a large part of the economic hardships in the US are not due to lockdowns but due to changing spending habits caused by the virus. There is a large amount of economic uncertainty right now and so people increase savings. Restaurants around me are open right now but I don't go to them as I have no desire to risk getting Covid, I used to spend ~$500 a month eating out. I now spend close to 0. I think many tens / hundreds of thousands of people are doing the same as I am. So despite a non locked down economy, restaurants are going out of business.
Until the virus is cured, people will continue to increase savings where possible as the virus causes economic uncertainty regardless of lockdown status. To think that if we just lifted all restrictions life would go back to normal is not accurate. If we lifted mask requirements in stores, my spending would sink even lower as my risk would go up.
Let’s try to keep snark and sarcasm out of the discussion, and instead argue out of data or first principles. HN is a rare bastion of light on the internet - a refuge of civil discussion
Going to an event with dozens of other people during covid, especially in the current situation, is like driving on a highway full of walking people. It's not a "it might be dangerous" situation, it's a "it's definitely going to end bad" situation
> And yet, comparison of catching a virus to homicide by gun is not.
That was not intended as a comparison, but as an obvious example of where "my body, my choice" clearly does not apply to making a slight movement of your index finger.
You're arguing that this situation should be an exception to the usual rules of personal liberty that we all take for granted -- I should be able to require you to wear a mask and not meet with family members, because $disease is deadly and transmissable.
OP pointed out that this is contradictory to the usual rhetoric on abortion.
Your response was that we make just such an exception for guns and drunk driving. The implication, therefore, is that this is of such an equivalent moral imperative, that the same reactions are justified here.
You may not want to be drawing the analogy, but if you aren't, there's no point in raising the subject at all.
> OP pointed out that this is contradictory to the usual rhetoric on abortion.
I'm pointing out that it's not, just like drunk driving and moving your finger when it happens to be connected to a gun aren't "pro-choice" moments.
"My body, my choice" doesn't apply in the same fashion when other people's rights are also involved. (And, to head-off the "nuh-uh", pro-choicers tend to fall down on the "no" side of fetal personhood.)
"I'm pointing out that it's not, just like drunk driving and moving your finger when it happens to be connected to a gun aren't "pro-choice" moments."
It's nothing like either of those, let alone "just like" them.
Catching a virus is not, in any way, like pulling the trigger on gun or choosing to drink and drive. The former happens to you. The latter two require personal agency.
Firstly, that's not the same commenter. Secondly, the drunk driving and gun examples were clearly provided merely as examples where "my body, my choice" doesn't apply.
If you're going to argue that gun homicide and drunk driving are examples that should also be followed here, you are making the analogy between catching a virus and those examples.
I think there's still a no fan vs fan distinction so they'll still be able to run the Pro more powerful, but it looks like it. I half suspect the Air was the one they wanted to release and they just didn't want there to be no Pro faster than an Air in the lineup.
Yes, but they only replaced the lowest-end 13 inch pro at this point, and are still selling the higher-end Intels. The performance versions will follow next year.
Is there any indication at this point that they'll make that clear? It seems kind of strange to buy a computer without really knowing what you're buying.
I guess apple didn't officially say what intel processors they have in their computers, but at least you could look it up and know what you're getting.
They have also never shared this info for iPhones/iPads, so no reason to believe they will do it for Macs going forward. But we should be seeing third party benchmarks soon enough.
