exelius

58 ms·

481.
by exelius 9y ago
That place used to be America.
482.
by exelius 9y ago
It's the definition of "successful" that I'm arguing against. It presupposes a lot about what the purpose of culture is/should be.
483.
by exelius 9y ago
I'm trying to say that her argument simply isn't very interesting :) Look, the only people who think America was better off in the 60s/70s are the ones who benefitted from the systemic discrimination inherent of that era. It&
484.
by exelius 9y ago
I don't think there's inherently anything wrong with the original author's thesis: not all cultures are created equal. But the author does make a critical conservative assumption by implying that economic output is a proxy fo
485.
by exelius 9y ago
China just opened up outside investment this week. Chinese capital already owns way more of America through various investment vehicles than we are willing to admit. We abdicated our global leadership to China the day Trump was elected. Our
486.
by exelius 9y ago
I don't disagree; but try doing business there without paying bribes.
487.
by exelius 9y ago
While you are technically correct, I've had to personally pay bribes to get a laptop with a bunch of sensitive data thru customs. Importing electronics into India without the right paperwork is illegal, but only the manufacturer can ap
488.
by exelius 9y ago
Come on -- the case in question is in India. Bribes are a way of life there. You literally cannot do business there without paying bribes. Nobody had to tell anyone to pay the bribe; if they're anything like every other company I'
489.
by exelius 9y ago
You can do that via blockchain as well; I imagine BK will own all the transaction processors, so for any transaction to an external wallet, you add on a fee. Ethereum and Bitcoin also do this; only the mechanism for determining the transact
490.
by exelius 9y ago
Actually, it's actually a great use of blockchain. That way, your customers can transfer points with eachother, etc -- then spend them at your restaurant. It does in fact decentralize trust -- the key here is that it's the restaur
491.
by exelius 9y ago
I would bet that Amazon does this intentionally. I don't know their rationale, but they're a data-driven company so they wouldn't keep doing it if it didn't produce desirable results.
492.
by exelius 9y ago
I disagree on a couple of these (SpaceX being the biggest) but yeah, I do think a lot of what comes out of Silicon Valley are solutions to the problems of business owners created by regulation. Notice the way that is phrased. The whole back
493.
by exelius 9y ago
Right; I think it would really creep people out to know what data is available to target for advertising purposes and how deeply it goes. Basically, there are a bunch of methods for tying your session back to your identity, and most DMPs wi
494.
by exelius 9y ago
Most Silicon Valley companies are based around regulatory circumvention in some way. But you're right; in this case you're just trading the SEC's governance for Ethereum's. I'm not sure that's a good tradeoff.
495.
by exelius 9y ago
DMPs. Amazon buys (and sells) data to/from DMPs. That data can (and often does) include a hash of your credit cards, all the e-mail addresses you go by, etc. Amazon can basically buy programmable ad inventory that says "I want to
496.
by exelius 9y ago
Also to clarify, Stuxnet was the trojan (widely attributed to the CIA and Mossad) designed to introduce subtle errors into the uranium centrifuges that Iran was using to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons development. It was really ingeniou
497.
by exelius 9y ago
Yeah; that's what you get with nation-state resources. How long does it really take to reverse-engineer a target like HDD firmware? Give a good hacker a month and they could probably figure it out for one HDD -- now realize the governm
498.
by exelius 9y ago
Flexibility is the solution to the diversity problem; but all it really means is a new set of expectations around when people are available. I have some medical issues that mean I often have to visit specialists on a work day; but rather th
499.
by exelius 9y ago
This is great -- I never knew about this paper but it reinforces a lot of things I learned. Namely, if you want to know how a company really works, ignore the org charts and map the systems architecture (a corollary to the author's t
500.
by exelius 9y ago
They have -- this is basically what Stuxnet did. Some of the equation group leaks were even further advanced -- they installed themselves in the hard drive firmware, then hid the sectors where the exploit code was stored even from the BIOS
501.
by exelius 9y ago
The Mythical Man-Month https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~yfcai/CS451/RequiredReadings/Myth...
502.
by exelius 9y ago
Human social order is built around a desire to feel superior to others. Capitalism "won" because it weaponised that desire -- not the other way around.
503.
by exelius 9y ago
On a global level, you may be right -- but recessions and market forces strike nationally, and it's hard to tell an out-of-work coal miner that "Sorry, there are no factory jobs to fall back on because we gave them to some really
504.
by exelius 9y ago
My personal theory is that recessions are dependent on wealth inequality. It makes sense if you think about it on the personal level -- if there is high wealth inequality, a greater percentage of the country suffers during an economic downt
505.
by exelius 9y ago
The thing is, you never notice a "real downturn" until right at the point the bottom falls out. It just looks like market cyclicality at first -- a 10% drop in equities over 6 months is nothing to worry about until you hit a week
506.
by exelius 9y ago
I'd say we're in a new golden age, after which we'll have a bunch of generic, open source implementations with very little need to engage in that type of development again. This is actually happening all over the tech world -
507.
by exelius 9y ago
I dunno about that -- for it to be intentional fraud, it would require the seller to know something. He probably knows next to nothing about electronics and just looked prices up in a catalog for a bunch of inventory he got really cheap som
508.
by exelius 9y ago
Cisco is circling the drain because their biggest customers finally realized they can build better products than Cisco using open source tools and commodity hardware. The big telecoms are all dramatically reducing spend and moving to propri
509.
by exelius 9y ago
With the oligarchy in Russia being what it is, it's not a stretch to think that any large company based in Russia is a proxy for the government. At the very least, the executives of that company could be pressured by the state security
510.
by exelius 9y ago
Information filtering is absolutely a leadership skill. It's the core component of managing, honestly. You don't want your boss to know all of the mistakes that people make, because it's your job as a manager to fix those. If

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