diamondhandle's comments

Can someone explain what flag in the top left corner is? There’s probably another non-country flag I missed in there too.

https://www.anom.io/trojan_shield_seal.jpg

Will rich nations back a deal to tax multinational citizens?

This is one area where America has a secret lead for both foreigners and ultra-rich citizens. Checkout GRATs and Opportunity Zones if you want to daydream about how to pay near-nothing in taxes as an American sitting on a massive windfall.

And then there’s all of the things you can do inside of an insurance policy.

That’s a pop star you ran out of town. The BBC or Der Spiegel weren’t falling all over themselves to be first to let everyone know that the Catholic Church had a giant problem. There’s a reason Spotlight was an important movie.

As a European who doesn’t think Europe has an ongoing skin color / racism problem, you’re signaling that you’ve never really thought about the proceeds of slavery and colonialism to finance, well, almost everything we associate with modern Europe. Especially ignorant if you’re French, British, Dutch, Belgian, Italian, and probably a few other extreme oppressors left off that list.

America has a lot of problems, but we TALK about them. Europe is at least 20 years behind the curve. You guys would be happy with pedophile priests if we hadn’t exposed them.

Ultimately Tether is backed by obligations from the participating exchanges to fund the tethers that were generated on their behalf. It is basically a scheme being run on behalf of the large crypto exchanges to enable wash trades (which are illegal in every market EXCEPT crypto because nobody figured out how to regulate crypto properly, as per Gensler’s recent comments).

If you want to kill Tether and Bitcoin, you don’t need to go after Tether directly or wait for some price drop. Subpoena all of the exchanges and ask for their commercial relationship with Tether to be documented, and for them to disclose all of their loan obligations, collateral and so on. But, your friendly politicians aren’t going to do that, because Coinbase and Binance and the others have locked up some very high powered lobbyists at this point. That’s where Madoff went wrong...

One of the craziest things is actually USDC — an attempt to replace Tether with a cleaned up, legitimate-looking version of the same nonsense.

Someone is going to make a chart comparing crypto to the already-ridiculous crypto derivatives market, and you’ll realize your point is totally irrelevant.

Companies don’t transact in Bitcoin because nobody wants to hold it. Except for companies getting a valuation boost from retail investors.

Okay, and what happens when I run a phony ad next to this one in the New York Times? What happens when I bribe the guy at the Times to accidentally use my hash rather than theirs?

It’s a cute gimmick, I’ll give them that.

According to https://discordstatus.com/, there isn’t an outage. Are you suggesting that there’s currently an ongoing outage, and their status page is useless? (Wouldn’t be the first time, but it’s surprising that an otherwise excellent engineering team would make such a mistake.)

Disclosure: not a Discord user

This sounds like an extremely naive and optimistic outlook. Large scale command and control situations are getting increasingly close to reality. Anyone who has followed US foreign policy and the like won’t be too surprised that this guy worked for the military (which is sad, really).

Bitcoin is Pachinko for middle-aged white men.

You can quote me on that.

(And, really, do some research into the $200B a year Pachinko industry, and you’ll see some disturbing parallels.)

Speaking of the founder of Ventrilo -- this video is priceless:

https://www.autoblog.com/2010/08/21/video-man-sells-gt500-ra...

I guess there's no more of that.

People can critique this writeup, but this is a useful data point for others interested in what happens as companies scale. These aren’t new pain points and they aren’t indicative of looming failure at Stripe — they’re just areas where we could probably do a better job, and might even provide business opportunities for startups that can help HR departments identify and address them.

America isn’t even 250 years old. That’s, what, five generations? Do remember that most American “settlement” of these areas was specifically designed to drive out the real locals, whose basic planning took on a seven-generation timescale.

With a lot of problems of this nature, especially social issues, the key is to “zoom out” to get a clearer, more sane picture of what’s going on. Humans were made to migrate, and these “locals” can adjust.

I am really glad you posted this, as I’ve heard similar from people within the org. It becomes hard to justify working on such products when you know you’re perpetuating so much harm, with zero interest from leadership in resolving the issues.

You might be getting downvoted by your former colleagues. Would you be surprised?

Here’s the meat:

> No VC funding.

> Over a million paying customers.

Now you’ve got my attention. I’d be interested to know what their tactics were for getting their first 100, and 1000, and 10,000 users.

DigitalOcean was a huge disappointment to me in terms of the quality of their offerings, particularly the Spaces product. I can’t imagine anyone doing anything serious on that cloud. Hope the author takes the gloves off at some point and explains how Vultr isn’t repeating those mistakes, as that’s the big reason the “Other” category in cloud computing continues to decline.

It’s way, way more common than you’d ever want to believe.

Here’s a starting point, from one very repressed culture where the act of going to the police puts great shame on your family and turns you into an outcast:

> There seems to be no sign of decline in the number of sexual abuse cases against children. According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, child consultation centers nationwide responded to 2,077 cases of child sexual abuse in fiscal 2019, up 2.75 times from fiscal 2000, when the Act on the Prevention, etc. of Child Abuse went into force. In 1,056 of these cases, the perpetrators were biological fathers.

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210322/p2a/00m/0na/01...

Please, listen to children and believe their stories.

People who comment on these moderator issues always overlook the huge huge mental red flag that these moderators always discuss: images of children being molested and tortured.

Endless images of young children. Being sexually assaulted, penetrated, made to do degrading things.

Think about how that statement makes you feel, and then imagine you’ve been tricked into looking at this stuff for money as a “content moderator.” It’s a form of cruel economic punishment.

Facebook wouldn’t have these problems if they weren’t obsessed with acquiring as many users as possible. They are the ones who should be forced to pay for the long term mental health of these workers.

California ballot initiative, anyone?

Our job in life is to engage in value creation. When money is decoupled from value creation, your long-term bet is that it will lose its value, as value creation is what actually matters in the “real” world.

This is also why “crypto” (the asset class, not technology) is so corrosive, because it makes people who have done approximately nothing to create value in society, but who’ve enjoyed a massive boost in monetary value, think they’ve “won” or accomplished something real. This doesn’t work long term, and will eventually collapse on itself like all false religions.

If you’re planning to be alive in 20 years, you’re better off making sure you have a work ethic and skills that generate value, than obsessing over any sort of wealth-hoarding instrument at all, because it is the only true protection against change.

I am guessing you mean the popularity of Apple Watch as a developer platform, which is totally correct. In fact, it might be the first platform where developers said “sorry Apple, we aren’t interested in making you more money.”