tomkarlo

56 ms·

541.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
France has some fairly serious issues with urban spaces in decline, even around the outskirts of Paris. That's where most of the major rioting was recently (2005) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_situation_in_the_French_... It doesn't
542.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Not sure how it seems professional. Compare it to the London bus bombings or Madrid, and it seems much more haphazard. For one thing, had it happened about two hours before, there was a much larger national / international audience when the
543.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Emergency alert systems have been mandated by the federal government in one for or another (radio, TV, etc) for decades. With an increasing number of people no longer watching live TV or radio (due to DVRs and the Internet) it makes sense t
544.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
It's not necessarily fragmentation, Person Finder is designed to federate information from multiple sources so that information isn't fragmented and sources don't get overwhelmed by the load spike. I don't know it the Red Cross system suppo
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
Zynga makes its money off "whales" because it's a freemium model, where heavy users pay for extra functionality. Facebook has an advertising model, where they basically get paid for "unique users". So once a user views more than a few pages
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
Ultimately, he's writing the story for the Seattle Times readers, not hard-core Facebook users.
547.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
That's a pretty vague statement. Do you have any facts or citation to support it?
548.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
I'd like to think we've gotten better about it in the last 35 years. If nothing else, the national media would be less likely to keep quiet.
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
This is what folks in the upper class like to believe so they can feel like there's more separating them from the middle class than just money. It's also a comfort to believe that even if you end up bankrupt, you're still "upper class". (An
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
Cyprus is not a good case study - the banks there actually are the whole economy, to some degree. Aside from tourism, they were supporting themselves by banking a lot the money coming of Russia, etc. The assets of Cypriot banks were ~9X t
551.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Something like that. Plus there are partial years involved - new classes arrive halfway through the year, so you only get 1/2 the bonus that year. Also, only a very small percentage of people last that long. Figure maybe 20-25% of first yea
552.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Yeah... I was going to add this. When you're making X, but you can see making 2X in a year or two, you're very reluctant to let it go. It's just human nature (and you also don't tend to consider the outcomes where you don't make 2X, or the
553.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
A hell of a lot more, when it's someone you know personally. That's why they want the Google+ info - so they can show you what people you know thought of something.
554.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Yup. And eventually it ends in tears, because they fail to hit their ridiculous return targets and the pension ends up massively underfunded. But of course at that point, the politicians are either gone, or just blame the fund for failing t
555.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Yes, but you're forgetting that this is a business where pretty much the only reason you're there and successful is because you're either enormously ego or money driven. Otherwise you just wouldn't last. Lots of people don't last very lon
556.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
I don't know that you need to regulate compensation. You just need to not bail them out when they blow up, and it will self-correct. And you shouldn't let them gamble with federally insured (FDIC) money - either be a investment bank or a co
557.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
That's not generally how it seems to work. For junior bankers under 30 (analysts and associates) you're making good money, but not such great money that you're putting away hundreds of thousands of dollars a year after your expenses and tax
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
You're assuming that the occasional gigantic bankruptcy isn't a natural outcome of the smartest strategy as a bank. But when you're comped on this year's profits, and a large chunk of your comp is cash, it makes sense to take huge risks tha
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
I worked at Lehman for 4+ years (left in 2008) and while I didn't feel so negative about work (I was more senior than the OP) I definitely was in a spot where I knew that if I kept at it for another 10-20 years -- no matter how much money I
560.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Even if you paid more, the incentives are wrong. Managers are told (often by state legislatures) to go out and hit unrealistic return targets, because to lower the targets would mean the states have to fund the pension more. If they hit the
561.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
In theory, Wall Street should accrue value in two forms: as a tax for the liquidity they provide, and as compensation for the risk they take. It used to be that the investment banks were mainly middle-men, but increasingly they've also beco
562.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
That doesn't seem to be the case, at least in a lot of the major recent crises like mortgage refinancing. It wasn't that they were running the numbers better; it was that they were misrepresenting the underlying quality of the securities in
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
This would be all fair and good if the risk they took along the way actually accrued back to Wall STreet. But the upsetting pattern that's in place is private profits, public losses. Wall Street isn't so much an engine for extracting value
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
The fact you can customize Android doesn't mean that you have to. The default Nexus OS is fine right out of the box, and generally reviewed as comparable to iOS. Just because you have the option to work on your car doesn't mean you have to.
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by tomkarlo 14y ago
Information you can't trust because the source is suspect is significantly less valuable. See: spamming on Yelp and Amazon reviews.
566.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
If something makes no sense to 90% of users it probably shouldn't be a default, it should be an option.
567.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
While I think that pattern sucks, I'm not sure that "not supporting" a standard constitutes "sabotaging" it. There's a big gap between "promoting" and "destroying/undermining", it's not either-or. Saying Google "sabotaged" a standard implie
568.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
Unfortunately, everyone browses YouTube. And there's a lot more not-smart people than smart people. (And teenagers have a lot more time on their hands than adults.) I'd argue the root problem of YouTube comments is that they're not assoc
569.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
How, in any way, did they "sabotage open standards like RSS"? That's a pretty broad statement to throw out there - that Google is somehow undermining the open standards process. I'd argue it's done better than other companies, including App
570.
by tomkarlo 14y ago
It's not the responsibility of the Chrome team to promote RSS if the large share of users aren't asking for it. To do so would actually be kind of anti-user. Much of what Chrome's done over time has been to remove extraneous UX elements and

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