1,124 karma · joined September 26, 2012
https://dotesports.com/streaming/news/over-27-9-billion-hour...
I too hear a lot of complaints about Twitch too but I feel that most of them have nothing to do with the product, but the zero-sum and competitive nature of gaming streaming. It's just difficult to succeed as a gaming streamer (or content creator more generally) and the vast majority of people who try will never make any meaningful amounts of money, so frustrations tend to be attributed to the arbitrary quirks of the platform, even though that's just the nature of any content business.
And, Ryan Cohen has no operational role at the company and changing an existing company is very different from building a new one. It's not just having some grand vision, but having the culture and talent to execute on it at every level. And it's unclear Ryan Cohen himself would have any particular expertise here - selling digital goods is very different from selling physical goods.
This is a bizarre take given the actual remark. This would've been widely condemned regardless and the overall reaction to this has nothing to do with the age of the fans of BTS.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/eleanorbate/bts-german-...
> "Dear teenagers who are listening: Please take no offense," Matuschik said, per a translation uploaded to YouTube. "But personally, I think that BTS is... Let me put it like this: BTS is like SARS."
> "It's an abbreviation for some fucking virus that we'll hopefully have a vaccine for soon as well," he continued.
> Matuschik went on to argue that he has "nothing against South Korea," and couldn't be called xenophobic because he owns a South Korean car. (According to Teen Vogue, one look at Matuschik's now-deleted Instagram account showed photos of his Daihatsu Copen, which is made in Japan.)
> "These little suckers brag with their cover of 'Fix You' by Coldplay," he said. "To which I respond: That's blasphemy... For doing that, you should have to spend a 20-year-long vacation in North Korea."
The real systemic issue is that nearly ever competent and rational actor is incentivized to run away from the problem. This applies to parents, teachers and administrators. No one's life gets better by taking this problem head on and making things incrementally better, so the only people who are left to deal with the problem are the ones who don't realize how bad things are, don't care or don't have the means to move away.
Japanese internment isn't considered problematic because it led to Japanese nationals that were supporting the Japanese war efforts being interned. It's problematic because it was indiscriminate and race-based - nearly all Japanese Americans in the continental US ended in internment camps. There's no comparison here - Japanese Americans were treated substantially worse than even German nationals, actual citizens of the country the US was at war with.
> You also forget that in Japan the Emperor was a cult-like hero. The majority would have walked over a cliff for him.
I'm struggling to find a charitable interpretation for this. Could you elaborate? Are you saying that it's okay to consider Americans of national origin X traitors if the US is at war with X and the country X happens to be led by a cult-like hero?
There's a distinction here between demonizing the enemy you're fighting against and demonizing the citizens of your own country for having a particular national origin. The cartoon here implies that Japanese-Americans (depicted the same way as the Japanese emperor in other cartoons) are traitors. And Dr. Seuss was German-American himself and did not try to imply through his cartoons that German-Americans or Italian-Americans are traitors.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26242516
> This we agree on. But we have to factor in adverse selection. If you're a prestigious employer, adverse selection is going to be small to non existent. The Harvard grads joining Dropbox are going to be all excellent. If you're a tier-2 employer with no particular unique value proposition, a Harvard grad that is willing to join you isn't the same thing as a randomly selected Harvard grad (unless there's a compelling reason why they would want to join), let alone the same thing as a Harvard grad entering Dropbox. There are selection effects working against you as an employer.
Edit:
I'll add that if you're hiring in tech, you're fairly unlikely to run into ivy league grads who got in primarily on the basis of their wealth. Computer Science attracts upwardly mobile types who got into these schools because they were nerdy overachievers and tends not to attract people born into wealth (they typically have better options and coding isn't really that prestigious at this level).
And generally speaking, lack of pedigree is much less of an issue once you're in and once you have prestigious employers on your resume, where you went to college becomes a lot less important to prospective employers.
https://people.com/crime/astronaut-love-triangle-nine-years-...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-urban-or-rural-is-y...
And the protection for residential tenants isn't due to the difficulty of finding new accommodation, but the consequences of not finding new accommodation - homelessness. It's substantially harder for commercial tenants to find new space than for residential tenants, but they do not enjoy such protection as residential tenants, because the consequences - going out of business - are substantially less dire.
Given that anyone losing access to AWS faces consequences more along the lines of a commercial tenant being evicted, rather than a residential tenant being evicted, this analogy does not work.
The fact that the co-op mode was released in 2015 with LoTV (5 years after the initial release of SC2) despite this being a substantially better default multiplayer mode that's unconstrained by multiplayer balancing speaks volumes about Blizzard's blind spot. They also learned the wrong lesson from DotA - SC2 isn't just a game but an incredible game engine, but Blizzard wasn't very good at taking advantage of this to broaden its appeal.
> The Short Grit Scale (Duckworth & Quinn, 2009) was used as a measure of grit and was administered to most of the NLSY participants in 2013 (6,476 of the original sample of 8,984 in 1997). It consists of 8 items in total, 4 items for each grit facet—perseverance and consistency of interest. Sample items are “I am diligent” (perseverance) and “new ideas and projects sometimes distract me from previous ones” (consistency of interest). Answers are given on a scale from 1 (very much like me) to 5 (not like me at all).
This is like measuring intelligence by asking people whether they identify with statements like "I am a fast learner." Most people aren't very self-aware. I often find that people that work less hard (in general across a wide range of things) often self-identify as having more grit because people work hardest when they work on something they are motivated to do, but being able to work superficially in the absence of motivation for long periods of time makes people feel they have more grit.
My suspicion is that grit (in the sense that matters, not whatever the grit researchers have been pushing) is mostly indistinguishable from intelligence as it's typically measured. I'd be shocked if most intelligence tests don't already do a better job of determining grit (in terms of the level of perseverance you could expect from someone) than asking someone if they are diligent.
"In recent years, flu-related deaths have ranged from about 12,000 to — in the worst year — 56,000, according to the CDC."
This is not to mention that these estimates include non flu deaths to compensate for the fact that not every dead person gets tested for the flu and even those that are, often wouldn't be documented as flu deaths. For example, if COVID-19 was merely a minor outbreak, COVID-19 deaths would be counted towards flu deaths, as the cause of the death would be viral pneumonia and viral pneumonia is statistically likely to be caused by the flu.
The reverse isn't close to true - we're for the most part only attributing deaths to COVID-19 when it's either a confirmed case or otherwise overwhelmingly likely to be caused by it. It's a certainty that COVID-19 will end up killing more people in the month of April than the flu kills most years.
Also, I think you're implicitly assuming that structured interviews cannot measure soft skills as they relate to workplace behavior. I would argue the opposite - the only way to ensure high standards for these types of skills is to have a structured interview. Otherwise, you're not systematically trying to hire people whose workplace behavior enhances group productivity, you're just hoping that whatever random biases that interviewers bring to the table end up being a net positive. Being a productive team player isn't about being able to impress a random person in an unstructured conversation - it's about knowing how to behave productively (combined with the willingness to do so, which unfortunately is contextual and virtually impossible to directly observe) in a wide variety of challenging situations.
Let's also not forget that what's being proposed here is a TBTF argument. The argument here is that letting a bunch of small businesses that don't have enough saved up to survive a few months of no revenue go under is going to be so bad for the economy that we have to literally suspend the enforcement of contracts more generally to save them. Of course, if this is actually the case, we could just bail out the affected businesses instead of saying goodbye to the system of contracts more generally. And I don't believe we in such a situation yet either. We can probably just let them fail. Most small businesses are very replaceable and failure rates are very high to begin with.
And more businesses will go under with your system. Most businesses that are losing most of their revenue can and have planned for losing revenue for a few months. Businesses can't realistically plan for the kinds of changes you're proposing because in a world where the government can modify by fiat every single contract in the whole world, nothing can realistically be planned. It's a total, forced default. And the specific scheme you're proposing turns every business into a bank - any time anyone owes a payment, you become a lender. This magnifies the effect of all insolvencies - now every business is tangled in a web of credit. It literally is the worst of both worlds - you introduce a shock the same way a large default would and ensure that no one could trust anyone, while also actually adding to the systematic risk by entangling every business in the system of credit. At least mass bankruptcies lead to deleveraging.
This is even if you assume that some sort of super AI can magically modify every contract in the world in such a way to best follow the spirit of what you want and have every party somehow agree with this. In reality, contracts are complicated beasts and you can't just modify one aspect of every contract in the world and expect things to be fine. Contracts are going to have all sorts of contingencies that are going to be highly ambiguous in a world where the government steps in and says certain obligations can be deferred. Again, people not being able to meet their obligations is absolutely nothing new in this world and the system is already designed to deal with this.
> 2) Direct payments would need to be astronomical to protect ordinary people for this duration.
No it doesn't. Keep in mind, it doesn't have to protect everyone from everything. $2000 a month for everyone for 2 months is $4000 * 300,000,000 or roughly 1.2 trillion dollars. This isn't much in the grand scheme of things and you're proposing an intervention of substantially larger magnitude. You can also effectively structure this as a loan for most of the people who don't need it by adding a deferred progressive tax on top of it.
> 3) Loans from the government directly to people and businesses might work if we had the apparatus for it. The critical thing, though, would be to freeze rents and interest if we did that. It'd be a much more complex scheme to implement. If I have a 10 years left on my mortgage, I could get a 10 year loan from the government for the principal, while the bank would lose out on 3 months' interest.
This doesn't make any sense - you're the one who proposed that businesses that are screwed by your scheme could survive by borrowing from the government. Why would that work in your scheme but not here? I don't understand the bit about your mortgage - why would you need to borrow (and why would anyone lend you) more than the payments you need to make for the next couple of months? Any sort of emergency government funding would be a credit line akin to extending payments, not a long fixed-term loan.
Again, I don't see any kind of realistic proposal here - it feels like a word game to come up with a vaguely workable-sounding (to people who don't understand how the economy works) plan that helps specific classes of people at the expense of everyone else.
A lot of businesses are going to go under no matter what and this isn't directly preventable. I don't think exposure to "small businesses" is large enough to cause a systematic failure and in any case, delaying payments doesn't solve the problem, if the small businesses themselves are insolvent. What systematically delaying payments does in this case is that you're turning everyone else into a bank. In that world, a lot more entities are left holding questionable debt and you significantly increase the systematic risk this poses, as no one will be able to trust anyone.
What you want to protect are the ordinary people, not businesses and this can be done through direct payments. Business owners are on average wealthier than others - it makes no sense to try to turn the entire system upside down to help them. Keep in mind, under your proposal, most people will lose their income, since income for most people is a payment that I suppose can now be deferred.
Why would they? And who's creditworthy in your world? Are banks going to be able untangle every single contract you have to see how this affects you? Especially in a world where every single customer and every single supplier is going to look at renegotiating contracts with you? The general notion of creditworthiness implies a relatively static world - changing everything is going to make everyone questionable from a credit perspective.
> Less credit-worthy businesses can get loans through the SBA through the stimulus. The government's existing programs (assuming the stimulus passes) will breach the extra 90 day gap for most.
Then why do we need this at all? Why can't we just have the affected businesses borrow from the government? Instead of A not paying B and B borrowing from the government to cover for not being paid, why not just have A borrow from the government so that we don't have to modify every single contract in the world in a highly unpredictable manner and freezing the entire economy?
> You're assuming the economy is humming along right now. It isn't. Large parts are shut down. Some parts aren't.
Most parts aren't shut down. No one is predicting a GDP decline of over 50% or an unemployment rate above 50%. Some parts are shut down, others are doing okay.
> Those frictions are causing massive structural collapse as we debate.
And this proposal literally is the massive structural collapse - it's the equivalent of eradicating COVID-19 by killing everyone.
> Also: In most cases, up-front payment is fine while everything else is shut down. I understand the importance of credit. But the alternative is worse. If this continues for 18 months, virtually all mortgages, private and commercial, will be under water. Virtually all renters will be evicted, or rents will have gone down many-fold. Etc.
Everything isn't shut down and again your business is toast if you're forced to make up-front payments while you're not getting paid. This is silly considering that there's a perfectly reasonable alternative of bailing out from the bottom up.
And no, this isn't continuing for 18 months, that's completely absurd. The economy will simply have to go on if an extended shutdown fails to work and the economic pains reach a certain threshold. Also, it's not honest to compare the impact of a shutdown without your proposal for 18 months with the impact of removing credit from the system for a couple of months. The economy as we know it is completely done if you freeze credit for 18 months.
And you can't actually lengthen payments for everything - some businesses and people with important resources will simply demand an up-front payment. Which will worsen the crunch for those that are stuck in the middle - some businesses will have to pay upfront, but get paid 3 months later. And no, banks won't want to lend to these businesses and if they can't determine whether you're one of those businesses or not, they will tighten credit on most businesses. Not to do so puts their own creditworthiness at risk.
This is all assuming you have perfect execution too - in reality, there will literally be millions of lawsuits since no one will be able to actually define what you're saying precisely enough to make the implied alterations to existing contracts unambiguous. It's also important to understand that most payments aren't interest payments - some of these cover actual costs.
Edit: consider what every company in the world will do in response to do this - they will review every contract they have to see if there's an angle that will help them optimize for this situation, and what kinds of addendum that they can force on others would put them in a more advantageous situation. No one will just sit and work according the spirit of the new rule, any ambiguities and angles will be exploited and lots of businesses and people will go end up on the wrong end of this.
And not all of these 76% of Americans are going to lose their jobs. Many people will, many others will have benefits, some others will be able to tighten their belts to make it work. And we can also just give everyone $$$ to ease the transition..
> Can we please stop pretending that this zombie market we've propped up since 2008 works? If you like markets, then you shouldn't agree with the fact that the government can effectively be held hostage every decade or so due to "too big to fail."
My definition of not working here isn't about some people getting unfairly rich at the expense of others. Literally people won't be able to get basic stuff at all. Entire supply chains will collapse since they are based on credit. You can't buy and sell at scale - these all involve contracts and payments. Credit isn't just about lending money for interest.