lbsnake7

Great documentary that Frontline made about something similar called Firestone and the Warlord. Firestone paid warlord Charles Taylor money to ‘protect’ their rubber plantations (essentially extortion), this money ended up providing him almost all of his funding during the Liberian civil war and made him a major player. He is now in prison for war crimes for what he did during this period.

They did all those things unsustainably so they could gain market share and raise prices when people were locked in. Similar to Uber and AirBnB etc. All those things are good but not feasible and subsidized by the capital/venture markets. The game is market share and ecosystem lock-in both from suppliers and customers.

A truly competitive marketplace allows any supplier to easily match with any customer. Suppliers gain market share by being the ‘best’, not by being the only option.

MLS has the same problem basketball leagues have overseas. The NBA is where the best players in the world play and I can watch it on TV, why would I watch a local sports league? There is some hometown pride from the diehards but casuals would watch the NBA. Similarly in soccer, I don’t think it is feasible to expect the MLS to break out of their niche. The casuals are watching the Premier League. We are now just watching the MLS figure out how big the niche can get.

I’ve heard of this before. That there are geniuses tolling away in fields but because they don’t have the right resources, no one knows who they are. But Isaac Newton changed science without the Industrial Revolution. Without running water or cars or electricity or modern medicine. Cream rises to the top and natural geniuses like that would be very apparent very fast.

The reason for the strong political influence of the military is two fold:

1. Political institutions in Pakistan are very weak and when things start to truly go bad, people look toward the military to bring law and order and not their elected leaders. This in turn gives the military a seat at the table to impact internal matters and foreign relations.

2. India - using India as a general boogeyman since independence has given the military brass a lot of money and power. They in turn use this to further their political ideology and when things start to go a way they don’t like they can start a coup. In turn the people generally go along with this as they think army control might be better than their leaders to solve their issues.

Like it was mentioned, Pakistan needs a few decades of peaceful democracy to get their shit together. Otherwise it will keep circling the drain of being a failed state.

I have been reading about this topic recently and still don't really understand how 'new money' is being created. In a loan, the bank creates an IOU that didn't exist before and doesn't point to a stack of $$ on the shelf. But it does point to the bank, and the bank itself has tons of customer deposits. And if I take that IOU and give it to a car dealership who puts it in their bank, for the transfer my bank will take actual money from the general pool of customer deposits. AND I have to pay back the loan which goes into the general pool. So while specific money isn't earmarked, the IOU represents money that the bank has right?

I guess a way to ask the question would be: if i were to liquidate all assets of a bank and call in every loan, would that be >= all customer deposits?

This is wrong. Tesla does have the advantage of being the more tech of all the car companies. They have the disadvantage of being bad at the car part. They spent massive amounts of time and energy being vertically integrated as much as possible. Historically car companies outsource everything in the car but their core differentiator (mostly engines). Tesla thought they could do everything themselves because it is cheaper but you are not going to make seats better than someone whose only job is to make seats. This is why they have all the quality problems.

Oil money solves everything. Even dumb ideas!

I would agree that Russia and China bluff their strength but there are entire countries that run their militaries off of purely Russian/Chinese equipment. To trust your national security to something that is subpar seems like a recipe for having a bad time.

My theory is that Russia threw their D league to go fight so that no one could accuse them of them actually trying to take over.

Is the clusterfuck that GE went through the last 10 years purely because they over extended their financing arm? I genuinely ask because their products are still in demand and they have huge market shares in the divisions they are in. On paper this conglomerate should’ve stayed together but it seems their financing division fucked them up?

There is a future that exists where cars aren’t allowed in major cities. Something similar to Amsterdam where people and bikes have right of way, and cars are the least preferred mode of travel. Obviously there are situations where you need motorized transport (emergencies, moving day, people with disabilities, businesses etc) but these can be serviced by autonomous vehicles run by the city. All vehicle infrastructure (roadways, parking) would be cut dramatically. Autonomous busses that pick up and drop you off exactly where you need would be the preferred mode of transport but you could even have personalized autonomous cars that people can rent for more privacy. But these would be slow moving vehicles swerving in and out of people and bike traffic, all connected to a central hub.

Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one will bike or walk and the demand for these vehicles would greatly strain the system. Not sure how you would account for it.

Musk has gained more from this market than any other human alive. From the over valuations to the cult of personality, he will be the poster for the 2010/2020s financial markets. It would be dumb for him not to get involved and influence in everything that is ‘now’. He has been on SNL, made songs with his musician girlfriend, has been in movies, got involved in celebrity dating drama, created companies for meme material, got in legal trouble for running his mouth, influences cryptos with tweets, moved to Austin, runs companies in the green energy space, heavy into AI.

I am surprised he hasn’t done anything with - well what is left?

Can someone help me understand this from an investment perspective? AOL and Yahoo were worth a combined $400 billion in the 90s. Was investing in either of those companies essentially a fail? Were all those investors wrong or did they somehow recoup their investment through dividends and such over the last 25 years to justify that market cap?

Currently the market is telling me that Facebook is a $900+ billion company. Will investors ever get $900 billion back?

When Facebook first went public, an older relative asked me if he should invest in Facebook. My only insight was being an internet user at the time and I said no, there was no reason that Facebook wouldn’t be another MySpace. Facebook's only value was their users and users were historically very finicky and moved around platforms at will. I argued that Facebook would make no money and wouldn’t be around in a couple of years. This obviously turned out wildly wrong but I always thought the user moat was always an issue and Facebook’s downfall would be related to it. I guess what this lawsuit says is that they essentially just bought their way out of people platform jumping.

There is a great PBS Frontline documentary called ‘Firestone and the Warlord’ about the Liberian Civil War in the 80’s and 90’s and the role that the Firestone Tire company had in legitimizing Charles Taylor (who was convicted of war crimes and is now in jail). I had no idea about Liberia let alone that they had a civil war, which was mainly about the dominance in Liberian society of black Americans.

Is this for real? Or is this bitcoin for 2020?

My argument to this would be that changing our world because of a faulty model system would be disastrous. Because of the advancements of the last two centuries more people have had food and water and basic necessities being met then at any time in history (and yet we still have billions suffering). Worsening their lives over something that might not happen is not a good way to run the world. The models being accurate is important so that if we do implement policy that end up worsening people’s lives we have proof that it is worth it.

I’m a climate change skeptic almost entirely because I don’t trust models. I believe there are too many dynamic things happening in the world for anyone to be able to predict accurately say the next 100 years (solar, earthquakes, volcanoes etc). One way to make me a believer though is an experiment: if I were to give you a 100 year stretch of history and you were able to accurately predict with the models what exactly happened in those 100 years.

The article talks about it a little bit about how the models are used to predict the 19th century to see if they are correct. But the models use the last 100 years as input so of course it will give you accurate output. But the real challenge of the models would be to accurately predict things that are not part of the inputs into the model. I don’t believe that these models can do this and are thus an exercise in straight extrapolation based on very complex and interconnected inputs.

Congratulations to her but it seems like age is seen as less of a factor in these countries. From an outside perspective, the Nordic countries have a very by the book form of government. Meaning the government/prime minister isn’t the result of the hopes and dreams of the constituents but more of how do we get things done with the least amount of turmoil. Kind of like how your local city government is run, where things seem more administrative and less political. Maybe that is the secret to their success.

You aren’t supposed to take that too seriously. The cabbies are usually doing it for dramatic effect for their passenger. It works for me when I’m in a cab and my cabbie honks at people. Feels like he’s trying to get somewhere on time. Probably if I paid attention, I would see him honking at people waiting for legitimate reasons.

The other day I was reading about Miranda rights and I didn’t realize it wasn’t a thing until the 60s. It was heavily pushed and publicized by lawyers to make it a necessity to have lawyers at every step of the way. There is some debate about how harder it is to get convictions because of the Miranda rights. I’m not trying to say anything about how important the rights are when people go through the process, I just thought it was interesting.

How does the rule about not talking to police work? What about when police are canvassing the neighborhood and they are knocking on every door? Are you supposed to talk then? What about when you have info of a crime? What about when you want to report a crime? Any of these situations is potentially a way for police to twist your words.

Who decides these nonnegotiable values? Society as a whole? If half of the country voted for Trump and believes in his values, then half of the society that you are a part of has different nonnegotiable values. So these values are no longer nonnegotiable and are now very much just whatever values the majority holds.

I don't know if this line of thinking will get any play on this forum as I have read people praising him constantly, but what does this mean for Snowden? He was working for the NSA, stole secrets from his government and gave it to reporters to distribute, and then sought and received asylum in Russia with the help of WikiLeaks. If WikiLeaks is heavily connected to the Russian government, at what stage can we say that Snowden effectively defected to Russia?

For people that don't know what 'digital industrial' is: Basically you put sensors on all your products and then gather all that data to predict/prevent failures or problems.

But why does GE constantly use the term to showcase how they are drastically changing their company (the term was used 12 times in this article alone)? Their main products are still engines and trains right? The only difference is now they have trains with sensors on them. This seems like just the next move forward, using the computer/internet for more productivity. Why would you have to name it something and then write articles about how your entire company is changing?

This is somewhat false. McDonalds amassed all of this real estate during the normal course of doing its main business. It would be like saying Walmart is in the shelf business because they have a lot of shelves. If amassing large amounts of real estate is the end goal, selling burgers for 50 years is probably not the best way to do it. I think McDonalds fears that if it spins off its real estate holdings, those properties will have no loyalty to McDonalds and could become a Starbucks or whatever. The value that McDonalds provides is that it is everywhere and at low prices. If it isn't everywhere, then it can't provide low prices and the whole thing crumbles.

No one is promising a return, but the amount of people in the Bitcoin community that have said that the price could realistically reach into the millions is laughably too many.

Bitcoin proponents have a lot in common with pyramid scheme pushers. 'It is a completely new kind of system', 'the powers-that-be are scared of this new technology because this will destroy their old system', 'this will change the world', 'you are just mad that you didn't get in on the ground floor. but don't worry you can still be involved as this will only to go up', 'the price is undervalued right now but once it starts going up there will be no stopping it', 'this isn't a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme or a pump-and-dump, this is legal and everyone hating is a shill for the other side!'. I'm paraphrasing a bit but you get the idea.

You should look up some videos of people supporting known pyramid schemes like Vemma and see the similarities between what they say and Bitcoin enthusiasts.

Money represents work. When you do work, you get money. When you want work done, you give money to someone else. That's fundamentally what our economy runs on. You could argue that some people take advantage of this on the top, but the vast majority of any economy is based on people doing work. The dollar is backed by the US government. When you go to a store and say you want to buy something, they have to take your money. In fact it's illegal for someone to not accept legal tender. That is the value of the dollar.

So now you say, but the US government isn't anyone special. Countries come and go in dominance, why is the dollar worth more than any other currency? Because their really is no other country with which everyone else wants to trade with on a massive scale. Americans are willing to give more money for work than any other country, so it is in other countries best interest to take dollars, which in turn increases the demand for said dollar.

Wouldn't it be useful for a digital currency like bitcoin to replace all of that? Not really, unless it has actual ties with actual money. A digital currency's only real value is being able to send and receive money, fast. But once it gets wherever, it still has to be converted back to the local currency. Gold and other commodities have physical values with physical properties than can physically do things. That in itself makes them have a base value, when they go up or down, that's just the market being the market.

You could start talking about how more companies (like Microsoft) are accepting bitcoin, so potentially you'll never have to convert it back to local currency but that conversation leads to the dollar being essentially worthless and the US government could collapse any minute and you should save all your money in bitcoin. Which sounds stupid and goes into pump-and-dump territory.

I always wondered if it was possible to have a dedicated autonomous car lane on the highway, similar to a HOV lane. To get on, you would park your car at a designated area. The computer would start to sync with all the other cars traveling in the lane, and it would take off and just add itself to the caravan of cars. You could go to sleep or do whatever else you wanted. When you reached your destination exit, the car would park itself again and wait for you to resume control of the car for the local streets.

You still have to deal with things mentioned in the article: random objects on the road, rain, sunlight, human driven cars crashing into your lane. But I think that's more manageable then having to deal with humans crossing the street, stop signs and traffic signals, random road changes in the middle of the night.

If it does go to South America, USA might be screwed. America imports all of it's bananas, Chile mostly. Hawaii makes a negligible amount that I think never even leaves Hawaii.

Side note, I've been interested in fruits, and the fruit trade so I've been trying to find out more information about how it all works. It is hard. Pretty much any hard data that comes out is from the USDA, no private entity does any sort of research or tracking of the movement of fruits. Farmers either don't care about that sort of stuff to do it on their own, or aren't technologically advanced enough to try and do it themselves.

Reddit has completely nose dived the past couple of years. Both from a administrative sense, and a content sense. When they first started the gold program, to quiet the uproar that some users would have more power than others, they said that everyone would get the features of gold, just after a little while. They did that the first couple of times but now they don't. They recently started an IAMA app (why?), which is essentially just a PR machine. They have very inconsistent admin policies, censoring some stuff not censoring other things.

A long time ago, there were users that would appear in the comments of every top post and they were almost always jokes. There were submitters that would reach the front page consistently. These people had essentially learned how to game Reddit, finding the right jokes and right material for their audience. And because of that, over the past couple of years it has became a race to the bottom in almost every subreddit and every comment. RES makes Reddit usable to some extent, but my filters filter out 75% of r/all, and what's left isn't very engaging.

The website has obviously outgrown me, and I have started spending most of my time on other sites now (sometimes even Digg). And it doesn't matter that Reddit lost me as a heavy user, cause I'm a nobody and Reddit will still get millions of views, just that Reddit meant a lot to me. It was the first website where I actually learned stuff. My Wikipedia usage went through the roof, reading up on things that people were talking about that I had no idea existed. Long articles and even handed discussions, occasional humor. I didn't comment or post a lot but I looked forward to getting lost in it. I miss it a little.