6 ms·

Fred Wilson: Protecting Business.

12 points by stakent 17y ago

mseebach 17y ago
> A councilmember mentioned the idea that we should help infrastructure providers protect their businesses. No, we shouldn't help anyone protect their businesses. We should let them protect their businesses. Regulating a business because we think they're doing it wrong is just as bad as doing all sorts of other proactive measures to help them stay in business. Interestingly, Wilson apparently changed his mind since he wrote this a month ago: > But if the FCC does not set the ground rules and insure open access to the infrastructure for everyone, that will hamper investment in what runs on top of the infrastructure. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/net-neutrality.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/net-neutrality.html Basically, he's arguing for one group of businesses (telcos) to be regulated, so another (coincidentally those that he makes a living of investing in) can do better. I'm sorry, but that's just not a coherent argument.
- jeromec 17y ago
  > Regulating a business because we think they're doing it wrong is just as bad as doing all sorts of other proactive measures to help them stay in business. I totally disagree. That statement is too general and each application depends on the specific case. Take for example General Motors. Should car manufacturing be regulated? Certain not, the marketplace will determine the efficiencies there, and at worst case give people inferior vehicles. However, it absolutely made sense to provide government assistance to GM, even though GM was run incorrectly, because of the broader reaching effects of letting it fall at that time. Now, we ask should the financial industry be regulated, and we see the answer is different, because the case is different; our entire dollar based economy is intertwined with the liquidity of the financial markets, so a worst case scenario there can trigger a severe economic depression, as we almost experienced. Different cases determine the need for government interaction, and the system as a whole is too complex to use one cookie cutter argument to apply to everything.
  - anamax 17y ago
    > However, it absolutely made sense to provide government assistance to GM, even though GM was run incorrectly, because of the broader reaching effects of letting it fall at that time. That's true only if something is being done so the effects of it failing will be lower or if the failure is averted and the cost of the assistance was less than the benefit received. However it's likely that GM is going to fail anyway and at roughly the same cost. Was delaying that really worth $12B? > Now, we ask should the financial industry be regulated, and we see the answer is different, because the case is different; our entire dollar based economy is intertwined with the liquidity of the financial markets, so a worst case scenario there can trigger a severe economic depression, as we almost experienced. You're assuming that regulation works. Since regulation arguably created the problems that we just experienced (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are creations of regulation as was the dependence of financial institutions on them, which caused said financial institutions to fail when Fannie/Freddie went down), that's questionable at best.
    - jeromec 17y ago
      > Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are creations of regulation as was the dependence of financial institutions on them, which caused said financial institutions to fail when Fannie/Freddie went down Huh? Am I missing something? Regulation is a rule (or law). Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). That would be like saying the Small Business Administration is business regulation. Also, to my knowledge Fannie and Freddie did not fail. I think we would have noticed considering they cover trillions of dollars worth of mortgages.
      - anamax 17y ago
        > Regulation is a rule (or law). Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). Fannie and Freddie are creations of law in the form of GSEs. Their GSE status made them especially vulnerable to govt interference. They weren't independent of govt in any meaningful sense. > That would be like saying the Small Business Administration is business regulation. It would be if SBA controlled as large a segment of biz lending as Fannie and Freddie did of the mortgage market. Fannie and Freddie define "conforming mortgage". Their lending standards define what mortages are sellable. If they screw it up, as they did, the market takes a huge hit. > Also, to my knowledge Fannie and Freddie did not fail. They got billions of dollars pumped into them and their stock price collapsed. They're not essentially in receivership and are running on govt funds. That's failure. > I think we would have noticed considering they cover trillions of dollars worth of mortgages. What's to notice? The failure of an institution doesn't imply that the debts owed it go away, so folks are still paying their mortgages (or not), regardless of Fannie and Freddie's problems. The take-over is designed to keep mortgages flowing. For a while it wasn't working - if you were looking for a mortgage, you noticed.
cwan 17y ago
This is a dupe (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=954586 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=954586) - I'm sure it wasn't intentional but links coming from Google Reader are adding a fairly long trailer that HN isn't recognizing as dupes.
- stakent 17y ago
  It was not intentional. Thank you for pointing out the "long trailer'. In the future I'll remove it.
- zck 17y ago
  Hrm, in the HN source v3.1, there's a function canonical-url that strips off anything after a ? in the url, but only when the site is in stemmable-sites* . If used to find dupes, this would work. However, there are only two places in the entire source (reported by grep) that refer to the variable stemmable-sites* . The first is in the definition of canonical-url. The second is assigning a table to stemmable-sites* . As far as I can tell, no urls are ever added to the table by the code, only by hand. It seems like stemmable-sites* is used to tell what sites don't use the query sting (the part of the url after the question mark) to differentiate pages (see: on Wikipedia the url http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis differs from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis_Costello http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis_Costello only in the query string, but the two pages are different), so they can be safely removed, and still get the same page. The problem here is that google's adding query strings to other site's domains. Now, these query strings don't change the page. However, HN assumes by default that they do, so it doesn't remove them in the canonical url. Since google is adding them to every link, you can't add a set of urls to stemmable-sites* and let canonical-url strip off the query string. It seems like you could remove any arguments with field names utm_source, utm_medium, or utm_campaign, but that would assume that no site uses the field/variable pairs to differentiate pages.

12 points by stakent 17y ago

> A councilmember mentioned the idea that we should help infrastructure providers protect their businesses. No, we shouldn't help anyone protect their businesses. We should let them protect their businesses. Regulating a business because we think they're doing it wrong is just as bad as doing all sorts of other proactive measures to help them stay in business. Interestingly, Wilson apparently changed his mind since he wrote this a month ago: > But if the FCC does not set the ground rules and insure open access to the infrastructure for everyone, that will hamper investment in what runs on top of the infrastructure. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/net-neutrality.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/net-neutrality.html Basically, he's arguing for one group of businesses (telcos) to be regulated, so another (coincidentally those that he makes a living of investing in) can do better. I'm sorry, but that's just not a coherent argument.

jeromec 17y ago
> Regulating a business because we think they're doing it wrong is just as bad as doing all sorts of other proactive measures to help them stay in business. I totally disagree. That statement is too general and each application depends on the specific case. Take for example General Motors. Should car manufacturing be regulated? Certain not, the marketplace will determine the efficiencies there, and at worst case give people inferior vehicles. However, it absolutely made sense to provide government assistance to GM, even though GM was run incorrectly, because of the broader reaching effects of letting it fall at that time. Now, we ask should the financial industry be regulated, and we see the answer is different, because the case is different; our entire dollar based economy is intertwined with the liquidity of the financial markets, so a worst case scenario there can trigger a severe economic depression, as we almost experienced. Different cases determine the need for government interaction, and the system as a whole is too complex to use one cookie cutter argument to apply to everything.
- anamax 17y ago
  > However, it absolutely made sense to provide government assistance to GM, even though GM was run incorrectly, because of the broader reaching effects of letting it fall at that time. That's true only if something is being done so the effects of it failing will be lower or if the failure is averted and the cost of the assistance was less than the benefit received. However it's likely that GM is going to fail anyway and at roughly the same cost. Was delaying that really worth $12B? > Now, we ask should the financial industry be regulated, and we see the answer is different, because the case is different; our entire dollar based economy is intertwined with the liquidity of the financial markets, so a worst case scenario there can trigger a severe economic depression, as we almost experienced. You're assuming that regulation works. Since regulation arguably created the problems that we just experienced (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are creations of regulation as was the dependence of financial institutions on them, which caused said financial institutions to fail when Fannie/Freddie went down), that's questionable at best.
  - jeromec 17y ago
    > Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are creations of regulation as was the dependence of financial institutions on them, which caused said financial institutions to fail when Fannie/Freddie went down Huh? Am I missing something? Regulation is a rule (or law). Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). That would be like saying the Small Business Administration is business regulation. Also, to my knowledge Fannie and Freddie did not fail. I think we would have noticed considering they cover trillions of dollars worth of mortgages.
    - anamax 17y ago
      > Regulation is a rule (or law). Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). Fannie and Freddie are creations of law in the form of GSEs. Their GSE status made them especially vulnerable to govt interference. They weren't independent of govt in any meaningful sense. > That would be like saying the Small Business Administration is business regulation. It would be if SBA controlled as large a segment of biz lending as Fannie and Freddie did of the mortgage market. Fannie and Freddie define "conforming mortgage". Their lending standards define what mortages are sellable. If they screw it up, as they did, the market takes a huge hit. > Also, to my knowledge Fannie and Freddie did not fail. They got billions of dollars pumped into them and their stock price collapsed. They're not essentially in receivership and are running on govt funds. That's failure. > I think we would have noticed considering they cover trillions of dollars worth of mortgages. What's to notice? The failure of an institution doesn't imply that the debts owed it go away, so folks are still paying their mortgages (or not), regardless of Fannie and Freddie's problems. The take-over is designed to keep mortgages flowing. For a while it wasn't working - if you were looking for a mortgage, you noticed.

cwan 17y ago

This is a dupe (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=954586 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=954586) - I'm sure it wasn't intentional but links coming from Google Reader are adding a fairly long trailer that HN isn't recognizing as dupes.

stakent 17y ago
It was not intentional. Thank you for pointing out the "long trailer'. In the future I'll remove it.
zck 17y ago
Hrm, in the HN source v3.1, there's a function canonical-url that strips off anything after a ? in the url, but only when the site is in stemmable-sites* . If used to find dupes, this would work. However, there are only two places in the entire source (reported by grep) that refer to the variable stemmable-sites* . The first is in the definition of canonical-url. The second is assigning a table to stemmable-sites* . As far as I can tell, no urls are ever added to the table by the code, only by hand. It seems like stemmable-sites* is used to tell what sites don't use the query sting (the part of the url after the question mark) to differentiate pages (see: on Wikipedia the url http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis differs from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis_Costello http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elvis_Costello only in the query string, but the two pages are different), so they can be safely removed, and still get the same page. The problem here is that google's adding query strings to other site's domains. Now, these query strings don't change the page. However, HN assumes by default that they do, so it doesn't remove them in the canonical url. Since google is adding them to every link, you can't add a set of urls to stemmable-sites* and let canonical-url strip off the query string. It seems like you could remove any arguments with field names utm_source, utm_medium, or utm_campaign, but that would assume that no site uses the field/variable pairs to differentiate pages.