tribune's comments

We had this (thankfully an optional addition to physical keys) at one of my previous buildings. The failure rate was maybe 2% but still way too high to trust for regular use.

The locks also ran on batteries, which a technician came out multiple times in the ~year I lived there to replace. Overall was a nice add-on to the physical key for e.g. guest access but the economics of these things given the battery replacement seems dubious. If it ain't broke...

Airbnb vs. hotels is like Mom and Pop restaurants vs. fast food to me. You might have a better experience at the former, but you know exactly what you're going to get at the latter.

My last Airbnb went perfectly smoothy but there was still a ton of communication with the host. And that was only part of a dozen+ emails and a similar number of app notifications related to the stay. Why? At some point I just want to show up, crash, and leave.

Note that the Forbes list doesn't necessarily reflect how people are getting rich at the moment, but how people in the more recent past have gotten rich. The catalyzing events that launch the fortunes of the wealthiest were already happening a while ago

RobinHood has served the purpose of getting the other "real" brokerages to eliminate fees on trades. Now that they're not the only discount show in town, and given their track record of anti-user behavior, it's past time to move on

Uh... Mississippi has the highest adult obesity rate in the country at 40.8 percent and Colorado has the lowest at 23.8 percent.

Seems like this must be different (or old) data by State?

I think it was Dan Carlin who suggested it might be a good idea to (every decade or so) conduct a live nuclear test above ground and publicize it widely. Not to make sure the bomb worked - but to remind everyone of the destructive power of these devices

Ok this is bad but maybe shitty customer service and slow processes are the price of a functioning financial system. Say what you will about the dated technology and opaque processes - legacy big banks work, your money is safe there, and there has not been a significant, system-wide technology error.

Not that things should never change - pieces of this puzzle should be replaced, but very carefully. A major technology exploit or bug at a major bank would be apocalyptically bad. The stakes are too high to rapidly entrust financial infrastructure to whichever fintech startup comes knocking. Consider the recent case of Robinhood, a big-leaguer as far as fintechs go, accidentally offering infinite leverage. This was enough to convince me not to want fintechs near the bones of the banking system for quite some time.

If divination by bird augury is so wise, why don't we still use that to plan agricultural layouts?

/s

But that sort of underscores the main argument against this stuff. Is it possible that many traditions, while once adaptive and beneficial, are no longer so? In other words, has the human situation departed so significantly from ancestral conditions that much of tradition is somewhere between irrelevant and harmful?

Of course not all tradition should be thrown out just for being old. But the tools of rationality have come a long way.

"[Women] make up 13.8% of mining and logging jobs, up from 12.6% a year earlier..."

That seems like a huge recomposition in a single year. What caused this?

It's not really about the leverage on its own. As Levine points out in his take on it [1], it's about finding ways to "hack the system". And, in no small part, entertain the merry band of fools at r/walllstreetbets

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-05/playin...

My phone crapped out during my first day at Oktoberferst in Germany. I figured it was the perfect excuse to "live in the real world" for the experience. I certainly did live in the real world. I also spent hours trying to find my travel buddies when we were inevitably separated.

Once I overheard a guy ranting about how iPods were bad because if you carried your music with you everywhere, you could feel whatever you wanted at any time, which was unnatural and bad for your psyche.

I think he was crazy. But it gave me pause

The company didn't sell a product that people wanted and its investors lost money; sometimes that's how things are supposed to work.

From Matt Levine of Bloomberg:

Here is a New York Times story about the “McKinsey Investment Office, or MIO Partners,” the in-house hedge fund of consulting firm McKinsey & Co., which invests employee money, including in companies that McKinsey advises. “That web of relationships underscores the unusual nature of McKinsey’s hedge fund, and the potential for undisclosed conflicts of interest between the fund’s investments and the advice the firm sells to clients,” says the Times, and I suppose there are some shady elements: When McKinsey advises on a bankruptcy, for instance, and its hedge fund owns one or another slice of the capital structure, then there’s a clear potential for conflicts of interest.

Mostly, though, it’s hard to get too worked up about this. For one thing, most of the fund’s money seems to be run by outside advisers, and even the stuff run by McKinsey employees seems to be mostly walled off from the consulting business. For another thing, the incentives are mostly good: McKinsey’s consultants are trying to make the company better, and its hedge fund is invested in the company and wants the company to get better, so there is no problem here. “The firm’s partners stood to profit from their own advice,” says the Times about McKinsey’s indirect investments in Valeant Pharmaceuticals, but why would that be bad? If they do stuff to make the stock go up, then they make money, but that is also what the company wants. (In the event, Valeant’s stock went down, which was bad for both Valeant and McKinsey.) Really companies ought to demand that their consultants buy some of their stock, so they have some skin in the game with their advice.

Of course, what would really be scandalous is if McKinsey’s hedge fund shorted companies that the firm advised, and then the consultants tried to give those companies ruinous advice. You couldn’t advertise that strategy, but much of the Times story is about how secretive MIO is, and if you can be secretive enough then maybe you could pull off this trade.

1. $3B in "incentives" sounds like a lot, but would this have been a good investment? i.e. would the city and State have gotten a reasonable return in the long run?

2. New York already has a lot to offer in terms of labor market, real estate for employees, and access to capital markets. Did Amazon really need incentives to want to be in NYC?

3. No huge loss for either party. NYC doesn't need Amazon, and Amazon can make the little people dance for them somewhere else.

It's hinted at in the article, but it's worth noting that Mandarin Chinese numbers are much simpler than their counterparts in most other languages. 1-10 are all monosyllabic and the system thereafter is pretty regular. Numbers are not as much of a mouthful as they are in English and probably easier to commit to memory.

The chart showing USG spending / GDP excludes transfer payments, which strikes me as misleading. Transfer payments have ballooned in the time period shown and are still transfers of cash out of the government's coffers. I'm not some sky-is-falling Federal debt doomsayer; borrowing has been cheap and we're not breaking a sweat to service the debt. Still, it's hardly controversial that the current trajectory is unsustainable in the not-so-long term of a few decades.

Not sure why you got downvoted, this is correct. If you, for example, overhear an executive on the street discussing how his company is going to bomb their earnings report, you wouldn't get in trouble for trading on that (if you somehow got "caught"). It's unfair in a sense because you just got lucky and stumbled into material, non-public information, but you also didn't really do anything wrong.

There's some interesting analysis in here but overall, I think it's focused on the wrong points. I don't want to ignore the danger posed by propaganda committees like those described in the article, but the author’s dismissal of bots/automation in this space as passé seems totally wrong. She writes: "bots are of increasingly minimal value...". Sure, in 2018, this is true for simple bots, but I doubt bots have said their final word. AI could power bots that are massively more sophisticated than their cousins that spam retweets, not to mention better at slipping through filters designed to catch them. Such next-gen bots might be able to read an article or view an image, decide what it’s about, formulate an "opinion" on it, then generate some sort of response - maybe a comment that's passable for (at least Internet-level) real human discourse.

Imagine such a bot on reddit, for instance. Imagine it's the stereotypical Russian bot, trolling the internet to sow discontent in the West. It might upvote anything about racial strife or immigration issues. It might show up in the comments to support Euro-skeptic candidates in the EU. It would pipe up about the Deep State in the US. Now imagine there's hundreds of thousands of similar bots, across a variety of sites. They would be able to control online discourse to a huge extent and dictate the media/opinion diet of millions of people. An army of these bots would be more powerful than any current propaganda arms, even those with State-level support.

I disagree with the author's conclusion that we have failed to reject the "myth of technological progress". The progress itself has not slowed - but people are certainly wary of it. We've kept the pin in the nuclear annihilation grenade for over 70 years, and have moved away from that doomsday in the last 30. Look at our science fiction: it's overwhelmingly filled with technology-fueled dystopias and post-apocalyptic worlds created by fictional but familiar human folly. We know what could happen if the world goes mad as it did in 1914, and it's not entirely accidental that this hasn't happened.

The recently-growing doubt about the ethics of Silicon Valley and the tech it produces is part of this overall techno-skeptic view. The pace of change brought on by the Internet is blistering, but in the latter half of this decade it's started receiving some well-deserved backlash. The lessons on the destructive potential for blind technological progress were hard fought, but they weren't for nothing. I see reason to be optimistic.