csee

53 ms·

541.
by csee 5y ago
For this argument to make sense, you would first have to show that in the absence of Amazon, low-skilled labor on aggregate (including the people currently working there) would be making more than they currently are making. If it turns out
542.
by csee 5y ago
> but you don't pay taxes like European bookstores If true, this isn't Amazon's fault, and it's not an externality either. If there's a loophole in the tax law, the onus is on the EU or France to fix it, the onus
543.
by csee 5y ago
I find this argument overly theoretical and unsupported. Book selling isn't a natural monopoly. If Amazon dumped books and forced out everyone, can they really then use that monopoly status to raise prices? The market has a fairly low
544.
by csee 5y ago
No, Amazon's low costs are because of scale economies and physical network effects. Exxon's low costs are because they externalize the costs to society. Let's be accurate. They may have some externalities but it's not a
545.
by csee 5y ago
That's farfetched. How would they monetize eye scans? 23andme and Facebook have clear commercial use cases for the data they collect. What's the commercial use case for collecting mere eye scan data? At best the data set is worth
546.
by csee 5y ago
The subject of those two sentences is different. The first is BTC, the second is smaller coins.
547.
by csee 5y ago
Why would the hashes be useful to anyone? The iris scanning tech, yes absolutely. But the hashes would be useless.
548.
by csee 5y ago
Why is this problematic? The risks as I see it are authoritarian governments figuring out the tech and using it. Or compelling Worldcoin to do their bidding. Storing hashes in itself doesn't seem like it can be abused. Suppose Worldcoi
549.
by csee 5y ago
Even if they could assess those risks, how confident are we that the government wouldn't err far too much on the side of risk aversion? Bureaucrats and politicians would see no upside in allowing a medium-risk high-reward venture to go
550.
by csee 5y ago
I don't think they can leak biometric data. Even if they figure out the hashing algo that doesn't mean they can invert someone's hash.
551.
by csee 5y ago
The "outsourcing" metaphor is mostly true but misses something important which is compulsion. Outsourcing implies a voluntary relationship, whereas a court order combined with an implicit threat of trouble if they don't follo
552.
by csee 5y ago
The market design is unfavorable to retail investors and traders partly due the regulations and laws in the US. - flow internalization which reduces liquidity on venues and widens spreads - dark pools which is liquidity only available to in
553.
by csee 5y ago
Great point! Although I'd think P(knife hijacking)*Cost(knife hijacking) would be much much larger than the cost of knives being confiscated, even if P(knife hijacking) is very small, just given how cheap knives are and how big that Co
554.
by csee 5y ago
Agreed, and you'd only have to put a small handful of execs in prison to create a massive deterrence effect. Social climbers and the managerial class are a paranoid, highly socially ovservent, news attentive and risk averse bunch, pet
555.
by csee 5y ago
I was going to put a disclaimer because of the risk of sounding cliche/ironic/sarcastic, but figured it was a legitimately good idea so I decided to spare people.
556.
by csee 5y ago
They search people randomly anyway, and they search people if the human operator thinks they see something suspicious. If we can keep the number of searches constant and just increase the probability of finding a knife, it's a win for
557.
by csee 5y ago
This would be great for ML. A knife detection algorithm that alerts the officer when it thinks it spots one when the bags go in the scanner.
558.
by csee 5y ago
Small fines probably even help them in the long run since they tame popular anger. I'd almost prefer no fines (in contrast to small fines) so people can transparently see how unaccountable they are. Ideally we can get big fines, though
559.
by csee 5y ago
That's part of the reason why I said fines were good. They're good both because it recovers some of the ill-gotten gains of shareholders (your point), but also because it incentives better governance. But due to agency problems, j
560.
by csee 5y ago
Yep, jail sentences. Fines are good but don't work that well, even if they're large, because of agency conflict of interest. It's mostly the shareholders who are paying the price. The execs already saw their call option paid
561.
by csee 5y ago
OK, I admit it's not unequivocally not bias. It could be bias. I would just say there could be other explanations, such as a different ratio between non-politician activists to politicians on either side of the isle and how each slice
562.
by csee 5y ago
"Fix: easy - don't use Twitter." Externalities are a problem still. When you're a truck driver and your employer gets 100 angry emails and phone calls because someone tweeted a picture of you doing an "OK si
563.
by csee 5y ago
That's not the definition of bias, in either the colloquial or statistics sense.
564.
by csee 5y ago
Please no more lawyers running for president. A CEO who built or run an actual value-adding business (e.g Flexport) probably has more integrity, intelligence and aptitude than the average lawyer-who-seeks-politics who very often turn out to
565.
by csee 5y ago
There's no shortage, technically, because supply and demand finds equilibrium, but that equilibrium is at an extremely high price which is pricing out everyone except the rich.
566.
by csee 5y ago
What if part of the reason they got hooked on drugs was they were down on their luck 8-15 years ago, and she's only seeing the end result of chronic drug abuse? There's a high correlation between low SES and ice use. I know of thr
567.
by csee 5y ago
Ok but it's also been documented that SF gives bus tickets, too. Everywhere is giving bus tickets. So if you're using this argument you'll need to show that SF is giving less bus tickets per homeless population.
568.
by csee 5y ago
I would be sympathetic to that if this fix was something highly complicated or requiring significant expertise to come up with. Then I could understand this oversight. And perhaps that's the case here, and it's just my ignorance s
569.
by csee 5y ago
A large team under POTUS has been working on this for two weeks and the Flexport CEO can sail through and come up with this within 24 hours of doing that? That's embarrassing and concerning. EDIT yes he's not an outsider to the in
570.
by csee 5y ago
If the POTUS personally commits to resolving the issue, it is concerning that an outsider can literally sail through and identify a high leverage solution. Like what the hell is going on with our institutions. There might be an explanation

More ›