cissou's comments

cissou | 4 months ago | on: Marble Fountain

What printer do you use for that and are you happy about it?

cissou | 3 years ago | on: Supercentenarian records show patterns indicative of errors and pension fraud (2020)

At first you just "pretend" to the taxman. You only start pretending publicly when all the people who could confound you are dead.

cissou | 3 years ago | on: FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank

That's wild. I wonder if it's good news for neobanks like Mercury and Brex who will see an influx of new customers, or on the contrary, startups will seek old, boring, safe banks instead of niche boutiques with lots of exposure to industry risk.

cissou | 3 years ago | on: At Xamarin I left every day at 5pm

Co-founder and CEO. Bullet 4 was actually CTO. Interesting divergence of opinion within the same (successful) company

cissou | 4 years ago | on: I'm Too Risk-Averse for Index Investing

100%. European markets are known to pay out more dividends whereas the US market is known to prioritize stock price growth. Return-wise that makes no theoretical difference.

cissou | 4 years ago | on: Letter from Union Pacific to LA District Attorney re: train thefts, safety [pdf]

It’s a 160% INCREASE, not a 60% one (you misread as +60%). But even +60% year over year would be no joke. Your comment assumes it’ll stay constant but if the trend holds the required investment in security could become sizable. Not that I even see the case for not prosecuting crime just because « UP has insurance » (you sure their insurer will be happy to pay for that crime and not raise premiums? Why should UP customers pay for security directly when the rest of the country gets it through actual police?)

cissou | 4 years ago | on: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

That’s an interesting point re/ yearly but on march 2020 yearly inflation dropped to 0% so I assume at the start of the pandemic many prices were down, not up

cissou | 4 years ago | on: Worker pay isn’t keeping up with inflation

Is it not rather that the inflation of the past 6-12 months has taken everyone by surprise, including employers, and the wages haven’t had time to adapt yet? What we don’t see in the article’s graph is that inflation used to be somewhat consistent but has risen sharply starting in March 2021: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi

cissou | 4 years ago | on: Online ID / age verification: the death of online search

I hear your argument but would you apply the same to alcohol and cigarettes? Let parents make sure their kids get none of it until they’re of age? I think it cannot work that way and it’s OK for society as a whole to help with the parenting.

cissou | 5 years ago | on: San Francisco’s political leadership has squandered a fortune (2019)

It's at least directional. In the other direction, a household is typically more than one income, whereas $175k is a per employee figure.

cissou | 5 years ago | on: Apple Watch momentum is building

Wait, what activity / health tracking does the Fenix have over the AW? EKG is a big plus of the AW in that regard. Battery life isnt great, but do you exercise for more than 24h at a time? Genuinely asking, trying to decide for myself

cissou | 6 years ago | on: Anatomy of a Rental Phishing Scam

What I'm left wondering is: what is the payoff for these scams? These aren't easy to scale, as you need to be manually writing plausible looking, personalized emails, waiting for someone to take the bait, "nurture" them over days or weeks, etc. Also you need specific, valuable skills: between the social engineering, the actual engineering, the perfect grammar, the creativity, someone who can pull this off can definitely get a high-paying, honest job pretty much anywhere. Add to that the hassle of having to constantly change web hosts, stories, payment processors, etc. as you're constantly going to be chased by your previously scammed "customers", and the very real risk of prosecution. The payoff must be ENORMOUS for it to be worth all this trouble. What am I missing?

cissou | 6 years ago | on: Sonos's “recycle mode” intentionally bricks devices so they can't be reused

Am I misunderstanding something? Once in recycle mode you're supposed to send them back so that Sonos can actually recycle (or even reuse, nothing stops them from refurbishing) the old device. Recycle mode seems to simply be a convenience so that people can get the 30% rebate immediately once they've shown they're serious about sending back the device. What sucks is that you have to trade up to recycle, if they offered some buy back program it'd be near perfect, right?

cissou | 6 years ago | on: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

Both the OP's article and yours have Zucman and Saez as a primary source for the data, so I doubt they'd contradict each other. It's 2 different arguments, one about the legal tax rate and one about the effective tax rate. In both cases the 50s were higher.

cissou | 6 years ago | on: I Took a Pay Cut for a More Meaningful Job

The citation is provided, with a link to the study:

> Nine out of 10 Americans say they would give up a significant portion of their paycheck–up to 23% of their lifetime earnings–if they could swap their day job for more meaningful work, according to the Harvard Business Review.

cissou | 6 years ago | on: Anxiety Looks Different in Men

The worst thing about this is that realizing it isn't necessarily the first step to improving your condition. On the contrary, it can lead to cultivating your own anxiety, because it gives you opportunities you wouldn't get with a more healthy work life...

cissou | 7 years ago | on: Amazon's Latest Supplier Purge Is an Indicator of Price Predation

OK understood, thanks a lot. In short, is it fair to say that the OP overlooked the difference between Wholesalers and Sellers, made it look like Amazon was mainly doing business with Wholesalers, whereas the nuance is actually important and most of Amazon's business is done with Sellers who are just as welcome as they used to be to use FBA. Correct?

cissou | 7 years ago | on: Amazon's Latest Supplier Purge Is an Indicator of Price Predation

> No, they are just not issuing purchase orders. No purchase order, no wholesale relationship. They explicitly communicated to Vendors who are not receiving anymore POs to tell them to consider selling their products on Amazon as Sellers, which again means not being a wholesaler anymore but becoming a retailer. They can sell FBM or FBA but Amazon collects fees either way. That is entirely up to the seller.

I'm not sure I understand. Does this not describe the bullying the OP mentions? Amazon went from issuing POs to no longer doing it, effectively forcing wholesalers to move to FBM. I have no horse in this race, I'm just trying to understand the argument. Thanks for shedding some light!

cissou | 7 years ago | on: Orange Livebox ADSL modems are leaking their WiFi credentials

Any patch available beyond making your box unavailable to the internet?

cissou | 7 years ago | on: Amazon driver arrested after taking GPS 'bait' package off Washington Co. porch

but in this case it doesn't make sense. I could understand returning the packages HE was supposed to deliver, but picking up another package already sitting on a porch sounds stupid: don't they have a way to check that this package was never his to deliver?