> Credit is useful for the single use case of buying a house.
I haven't paid a cent in interest on a credit card since I was in my early 20s. Thanks to credit card points/miles, I've flown all over the world (often in business class), enjoyed stays at hotels, had access to airport lounge access, received various upgrades on hotel accommodations, car rentals, etc. -- all for next to nothing.
Credit cards are an excellent tool if you are willing and able to use them properly.
Personally, I get tired of the apples to oranges comparisons whereby bitcoins and blockchain have the same feature set as currency and banks.
Also get tired of the aspirational rants of how it is going to fix supply chains and offer banking to the underserved communities. And yes, I understand banking, supply chains, and crypto enough to know that that will never happen.
> Also get tired of the aspirational rants of how it is going to fix supply chains and offer banking to the underserved communities. And yes, I understand banking, supply chains, and crypto enough to know that that will never happen.
agreed. have you heard of hREA [1] and http://valueflo.ws, led by Bob and Lynn from http://mikorizal.org, and others? it's sort of an open source SAP alternative designed as local-first networked software. "Radically distributed supply chain systems". it uses the REA accounting method [2] to implement LETS and mutual credit type economic networks for cooperatives / small business ecosystems / commons based peer production / any transitional/solidarity economies.
Bonfire is also implementing the Valueflows vocabulary on ActivityPub [3].
I appreciate the response and will have to investigate these. My more recent jobs have taken me away from these areas but they are very interesting topics.
I think that there are many valid ways to improve business systems software, but that the current leaders are entrenched to a level that they won’t be replaced, similar to libre office not taking off regardless of its rich set of features. I am glad that open source databases have done well though.
I recall working at a large manufacturing warehouse that switched systems, 2 years into the schedule they had to continue to push out the changeover for a variety of issues.
This bears repeating every time this gets mentioned:
In the US, even before the pandemic, it was "standard" for ICUs at most level 1 trauma centers and tertiary care facilities to operate at 80-90% capacity[1] and for ERs to be overwhelmed by patients in bad flu years[2].
SARS-CoV-2 is basically already an endemic virus, just like influenza, and in the near-term it is absolutely unrealistic to expect that somehow miraculously unlike influenza, it won't have a material impact on hospital utilization rates.
I had the exact same reaction. It's like the NY Times is stuck in the past and totally out of touch with the present, and hung up on stereotypes and ideological generalizations that aren't very accurate.
> So I'm very sure that my most effective means of improving the situation is to put cameras on their affairs from my house and get all the other adjacent neighbors to do likewise. The dealers have felt the heat, and now their clients are normally more respectful and quiet, presumably at the prompting of the dealers.
Do you really believe this is going to be effective? In your scenario where the police are unresponsive to reports, what makes you think that they're suddenly going to care if you send them a bunch of surveillance video of illicit activity?
The drug dealers know when they're operating in safe territory. In places like San Francisco, people openly deal and use drugs on the street because they know that they are likely to get away with it.
I bet if you posed as a journalist, some of these people would even let you photograph their activities, all while flashing big smiles.
> Some in the investment community say that much like Tesla's rally to become the most valuable car company on Earth, Rivian's value is also a sign that valuations have gotten out of hand.
> "Despite the popularity of the electric vehicle market and huge gains in Tesla's stock, we think investors should avoid the temptation to buy Rivian shares," investment research firm New Constructs said of the company ahead of the IPO.
> The firm notes that when Tesla went public in 2010, it was valued at $1.7 billion US, was at least already delivering vehicles to paying customers, and was on track to sell 1,500 vehicles that first year. That's more than Rivian says it will do, despite now being worth about 50 times what Tesla was worth then.
> "To buy the stock at such a high price before the company has shown it can consistently produce more than a handful of cars seems ridiculous to us," New Constructs said. "Investors shouldn't buy a stock just because it's in a hot sector."
Rivian might very well prove to be a horrible investment at current prices. It would certainly impossible to justify its valuation in a sane, "normal" market. But the market hasn't been normal for over a decade and just keeps getting less and less sane.
Is there really any point in trying to warn people about valuations anymore? As far as the market is concerned, we're basically living in a post-logic, post-sanity world and sadly, investors who stick to logic and sanity are going to miss out on most of the gains.
Of course, if and when the bubble pops, a lot of people will lose money but that doesn't mean that the logic and sanity folks will profit because, well, you'd have to be insane to be heavy short almost anything in this market.
> post-logic, post-sanity world and sadly, investors who stick to logic and sanity are going to miss out on most of the gains.
No we don't. Good decisions win out in the end. People said Tesla was a bubble for 10+ years. And every couple years they justify the valuation they had a few years before. Tesla wasn't a crazy stock in 2018 given what we know now about what has happened since then. Maybe that is different now but some companies do grow into their valuations. Other companies, like Nikola Motors was all scam. Many people lost money betting in Nikola and many made money with shorts.
Some companies make it some don't, just saying 'the world is irrational' therefore never tell anybody anything is irrational is borderline an insane state of mind.
Those people that called out for Nikola having no rational bases for their stock price were actually right. Plenty of people still lost money because it wasn't right in the correct timeframe.
> Of course, if and when the bubble pops, a lot of people will lose money but that doesn't mean that the logic and sanity folks will profit because, well, you'd have to be insane to be heavy short almost anything in this market.
How about instead of going 'short' invest in companies with good fundamentals that have a high chance of making it threw troubling times. Just because you think something is overvalued doesn't mean the right thing it to go short. Short term investing is always gambling.
And in the longer term things actually look much more rational then obsessing over all these short term swings. If I buy stocks I plan to held them for years because its companies that I think have good fundamentals.
If you think the whole stock market and the whole economy is fundamentally overvalled, then go get invested in gold, not shorts.
Just saying the world is irrational and actual smart people will not make gains is kind of self-pitting. In fact the actual smart people who do make the right long term choices do make money.
> But the market hasn't been normal for over a decade and just keeps getting less and less sane.
And a decade ago people said it has gone crazy in the decade before. Rinse and repeat for literally ever since market existed.
It's not post-sanity. It's perfectly stupid. When you buy Chinese widgets the Chinese don't spend the money on your electric cars (otherwise they wouldn't be able to run a trade surplus). They buy the electric car company. I hope it's clear that this speculation must happen, because doing anything that is not speculative would require abandoning the idea of a permanent trade surplus or deficit.
>Of course, if and when the bubble pops, a lot of people will lose money but that doesn't mean that the logic and sanity folks will profit because, well, you'd have to be insane to be heavy short almost anything in this market.
At the current rate of money printing and low interest rates it seems like the goal is to keep pumping the bubble... so yeah, it's gonna take a while for the bubble to pop and in the meantime more gains to be made.
The question will be, what will the world look like then.
Not mentioned in the Protocol article is that Angelina also has adult entertainment industry experience and expertise in Mia Khalifa. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from UC Berkeley (emphasis on Cum is in the CV).
Is it possible that some of the responses Angelina received were from pervy hiring managers, not hiring managers who only looked at the companies she claimed to have worked for?
Maybe, but then they're also morons in addition to pervs. The bullet points make absolutely no sense, the conclusion has to be that no one bothered to read the CV passed some automated buzzword scanning and perhaps a quick look at the company names.
I mean... the very first bullet says she built something using React for AI on blockchain. She was also the "team coffee maker - ensured team of 6 was fully caffeinated with Antarctican coffee beans ground to 14 nm particles".
I felt the same way and find it somewhat ironic that this guy now works at...wait for it...Facebook. You know, the world's most non-toxic, consumer-centric charity.
It's also amusing that he has this in his LinkedIn bio:
> Previously, he led design for Zillow’s newest venture, Zillow Offers—building the team and product vision of an end-to-end experience for buying, selling, financing and managing a home, all within the Zillow ecosystem.
So he takes credit for leading the design for Zillow Offers and building the team and product vision, but then posts a retrospective criticizing it all and disavowing any responsibility in the product's failure? Strange, but perhaps explains why he's a good fit for Facebook.
Yep he's likely trying to put a good face on it and rationalize away the failure. It's human nature especially when career/rep/money is on the line. I'm sure there were problems outside his control but it's highly unlikely this is an accurate and objective account of the project's history
I think this is only true to an extent. In my own career, I've worked for and hired people who were honest about their roles, taking a reasonable amount of credit where appropriate while also owning the things that didn't go so well.
In tech, there's really no downside to this because the industry is pretty damn forgiving. Failure is expected, and a lot of super successful people had multiple failures under their belt before they succeeded.
It's really, really cringey to have a LinkedIn bio where you basically position yourself as the owner of a product and then elsewhere make it sound like you not only had nothing to do with said product's failure but in fact knew how to make it successful but couldn't because everyone else was flawed in some way.
I have been in the position of leading products in what turned out later to be bad directions. It does not matter if you are “in charge of a product” when management shoves bad ideas down your throat and ultimately derails any attempt to keep the train running smoothly on its tracks. Unfortunately, this is no way to address such a situation. If you have already moved on to greener pastures, consider yourself lucky and let it go.
