statusquoantefa's comments

Ballmer built the amazing airplane that Bill Gates owned. Ballmer was there from close to the beginning, knew much more about business than Gates, and was intrumental.

I once thought it would be funny to offer a service that bought "bundles" of securitized mortgages, but would then separate them out and offer to sell specific mortgages to people's arch enemies who would presumably pay a premium.

the elevator pitch is "the google of mortgages".

To be clear, they're talking about the un-intellectual dark web: they aren't yet willing to take the risk featuring in-band IDW viewpoints on their pages or airwaves.

Probably, in the face of trends like Brexit and a sense of their declining popularity, this is phase one of preparing to take their resistance underground if they have to.

> Blaming the user is a pernicious problem in UX engineering

I've been around computers since well before it was called UX, and since UX? trust me, I never blame users, I definitely blame UX.

we need to bring back UI.

> while they knew they had the cure ... would we not find the only ethical solution

(while we are minor nitpicking, they have the cure, our view of their ethics might not be the same as their view of theirs)

> observing us while they knew they had the cure to our dying loved ones

Good! I, for one, appreciate selection pressure from our insect overlords, it's the only way Darwinism works. Seriously, science is serious business, and I can't stand namby-pambyism. We are supposed to die, it's narcissistic to believe you and yours are more important than the species.

it's healthy for forest fires to periodically burn out the accumulated brush and revitalize the ecosystem.

> (But it solves them exponentially faster than a classical computer)

do you mean literally exponentially? or do you mean "a lot" faster?

> It seems to imply that those two people are magically going to agree to something before the meeting

it's not magic, it entails preparation, but if you are holding meetings and you don't have the principal attendees at the meetings in agreement before the group gathers, you're going to have highly unproductive meetings and you'll encourage civil wars to break out.

Meetings work best when they present a solution to a problem, and get "buy in" from the attendees who each present to the group what they will be doing to advance toward the agreed upon goals.

The executive or manager who is calling the meeting achieves this by visiting each participant in the upcoming meeting in advance and asking, "here's what we are going to talk about at the meeting, what are you going to say on this topic?" and revisiting with "here is what so-and-so is going to say, how does that affect your team, what do you need to do to prepare?" etc.

People find it much easier to agree to group goals one-on-one and very much appreciate being given time in advance to prepare their plans and statements of purpose and not be caught off-guard. Other participants in meetings benefit from hearing the harmony of purpose at the meeting and they in turn step forward to announce how they will help.

Think of it like a football huddle where plans are announced and agreed to; people aren't going into the huddle looking to argue, they're looking for agreement.

And yes, I realize that many of you have not experienced meetings organized this way, and that's why I wrote it up, it was incredibly refreshing when I first got to experience a company run this way.

they can't force you to participate in the receipt checking, you can refuse, and you are free to leave. Because those places are clubs, they can take your membership away and deny you entry in the future, but once you pay for something, it's yours, and they can't search you or your belongings against your will; unless they wish to make an allegation that they saw you steal something, in which case they can tell that to a police officer.

in most cases these days, the degree doesn't pay, so you're right, it must be the product.

> never compete on price for that exact reason

no, you should compete on price if you are the low cost producer, as my neighbor comment notes. monopolists frequently are the low cost producer because of economies of scale, scope, etc.

another "compete on price" strategy is if you are the disruptive upstart: you have small market share, so your losses (tangible and intangible) will be lower compared the losses suffered by the fat lazy high-multiples incumbent who must satisfy angry shareholders when they see profit eroding.

It's funny how everybody covets more power and more money, employers and employees alike, and always want to wrap it all up in a facade of being the moral choice.

I know, people here are demanding that after you fill up at an all you can eat buffet, you should be allowed to sell your seat to somebody else.

you are exactly right, but when people have bad ideas lodged in their heads, it's difficult to dislodge them.

yes, but the point of my post is that the unwarranted enthusiasm for "home ownership because rent is a waste" leads to political destabilization of sectors of the finance markets. In terms of the point you raise, the "rent is a waste" belief means that your leveraged investment in housing just keeps you on the escalator because, while your investment has appreciated, you would need to roll it over into your next house, i.e. you rarely/never get to treat it as disposible income.

and all the bankruptcies and home foreclosures in an economic downturn shows the cost of high leveraged investing. A better way to achieve leverage is high beta stocks. Beta behaves just like leverage, except it automatically rebalances debt/equity on the way up and down. And the base rate of growth of the stock market is substantially higher, so you are leveraging a higher rate, even though you can't lever as much as a home.

and don't forget, owning a home and living in it as real estate prices rise means that you are "throwing away" higher and higher virtual rents that you would be entitled to collect and which factor into the value of your home.

well, it's difficult to predict on the one hand.

on the other hand, it is easy to predict that: when the average joe holds "home ownership" up as the sterling example of "making it"; then the average politician will determine that the best way to make voters happy is to increase home ownership by lowering barriers, and exempting home ownership from risk, taxes, estates, bankruptcy, medical expenses, etc. all in the name of "obvious" fairness;

then [it's easy to predict that]: mortgages and mortgage backed institutions will become unsound.

TL;DR a crisis like this is going to happen again, and it happened before, see previous "savings and loan" crisis.

bonus lesson in finance/accounting: if the problem is framed and worded properly, it's easy to see that money paid for rent is not actually "wasted money down the drain", and that it is a fallacy that it is better to put the money toward a mortgage.

Let's say out of college you live in your old room at mom's while you save money to get your own place. Your job turns out well and you're making good money, but instead of renting your own apt, you stay at mom's to save for a down payment on a first house. You save up, and you buy a place. OK so far?

Now owning your own place, do you move into it? Well, think about it, you could stay at mom's and rent this new place you own out to somebody else and let them "waste the rent" while you collect all this fingerquotes "free money". Id est, i.e., if you move into your new place, you are essentially depriving yourself of the rent that you are entitled to earn from it; you effectively pay rent to live in your owned home. You are the one "wasting the rent money".

And the extra details actually work against you: mortgage interest expense is tax deductible, right? Well, if you rent the place out, ALL expenses are tax deductible, that's more deductions than if you live in a place.

As an additional point, is rent "such a waste of money to the tenant" that wealthy people (let's use Bill Gates as an example) buy lots and lots of houses and apartments to rent out to the rental suckers? no, they don't.

TL;DR purely financially, owning is not better than renting; rent is not wasted money, at least not more than the fingerquotes rent you spend when you live in your own place.

ycombinator, where standard econ theory gets downvoted by people who've never taken econ. Here's a challenge, explain the history of the US stock market vs world stock markets and US venture capital vs world venture capital better than I did.

The US economy is the driver of the world economy, and has been for quite some time and it's why we see so much innovation of entire new sectors in the US. (Yes, you can see sustained higher growth for a time in some other places, like China, because starting from a lower level allows for piggybacking in the same way the US economy grew with regard to Europe in the 19th century.)

The reason mature European economies do not come close to entrepreneurship and the rate of innovation in the US economy is because widespread govt regulation and taxes across the board stifles economic options for investors.

It is simply not true that housing and employment laws in other places "works great", it's a tradeoff, and if the US follows that path the world will become a less good place for everybody because Europe and Asia will no longer have an innovative capitalist petri dish to follow and leverage from.