mamon

The lawsuit I cited suggests that two exchanges were actually complicit in the scam - and Poloniex is one of them.

Also, since Tether has its bank accounts in Deltec bank in Bahamas, the inflow of $15B to such a small country would be visible in country's foreign currency balance sheets. The official report from Bahamas government shows that this balance is currently around $60B and has actually decreased during 2020. So this $15B worth of newly issued Tethers are not actually backed by USD (those money never reached Tether bank account), they were printed out of thin air.

>> But banks in the United States normally operate with a reserve requirement of only 10%

The banks are legally allowed to do that, Tether wasn't. According to the lawsuit at some point they started declining buying back USDT, due to the lack of real dollars in their bank account. That's clearly a fraud, since they were assuring their customers they have sufficient reserves.

Also, the reason they were at some point missing $850M was because that money was seized in various countries as coming from drug cartels. Seems like there's a lot of rope to hang them with.

Yes, and that's exactly what's happening right now, that's why Bitcoin price rose from 10k to 32k USD since September. Music is going to stop soon, and people are desperately looking for chairs to sit on.

If you plan to buy Bitcoin please wait a few months until lawsuit against Tether [1] gets a ruling - if they are found guilty of a price manipulation scheme it should temporarily bring Bitcoin price down to more reasonable level, say below 1000 USD.

[1] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.524076...

Not necessarily. You can always generate self-singed certificate, yes, but trusted issuers such as Let's Encrypt often use challenges that require you to temporarily modify the DNS record - that wouldn't be possible in this case.

It's not only about cost, it's also about practicality: there is some baseline demand on electricity even at night. Solar obviously cannot fulfill that demand. Wind also can't because it is too unreliable. So we do need some storage technology, and hydrogen is one of the options. It seems way cheaper than using Lithium-Ion batteries, but might be still more expensive than, say, pumping water uphill and using that to power a hydroelectric plant.

Energy transmission can be some solution here, but we might be forced to transmit energy across the continents (so, for example solar plant in Sahara delivers power to New York City at night) which probably is too costly.

>> It's solvable with excess generation capacity, storage, and transmission capacity

So now you're arguing FOR energy storage? Your previous post was basically: "let's overprovision and let excessive energy go to waste, instead of building costly storage infrastructure.".

>> Renewable energy is getting so cheap that throwing kWh away can be cheaper than the cost of idling other capital infrastructure.

That's missing the point.The problem isn't "what to do with excess of energy at peak times?", it's "where do we get energy from on quiet, wind-less nights?" Solar and wind are highly unreliable, so storing energy for is the necessity. Or we can use nuclear.

But is gaming at fault here? Or maybe "gaming personalities" are simply people for which real life sucks, so they try to alleviate their pain by gaming a lot? Maybe gaming was the thing that delayed their suicide by months/years?

I can sit quietly in a room just fine. My problems start when I start talking with other people - I then realize how many of them are idiots and assholes.

No, that means that this one investor THINKS they are worth 10x dollars. Other investors might value the company differently, based on number of customers, cash in bank, their own subjective opinion on the product, etc.

where do I buy such device?

>> You're being ridiculous here. Nobody is asking for that, they're asking for sensible road design and sensible rules.

Oh, you'd be surprised what "city activists" can devise in their stupid heads in my country. Their recent idea is: driver hiting pederastian should always be at fault, even if a drunk pederastian is suddenly jumping in front of their car, from behind the parked car or other obstacle.

I would guess that GP doesn't feel qualified... Earning a shitload of money once you've joined FAANG is the easy part, hard part is getting hired by FAANG in the first place.

Benefits of being the only global superpower. Believe me, other countries would gladly do the same, they just lack the aircraft carrier fleet to support such policy.

> how do we effectively convince people this new type of vaccine is safe long-term?

Same as always: do a long-term clinical trial and look for any side effects.

Yes, there are exceptions to the rule:

1. Sometimes talent is hard to recognize, as in the people that you listed.

2. Sometimes the whole company is such a bad situation that they have to fire whole teams/branches indiscriminately.

But still, I think that parent comment about "a lot of talented people being out of work for a long time" is not true.

Companies don't fire talented people. They fire those, who, during the good times were just barely adequate for the job they did, and in the bad times they became liability.

This seems like a prank by some angry, overworked developer....

You must be thinking about AESAN countries alone, which have about $3 trillion GDP, but this free trade agreement also includes China ($13.6T), Japan ($5T) and Australia ($1.4T), placing it ahead of both USA ($20T) and EU ($15.6T)

That was my point - that China can just focus on trading with other Asian countries and be well. Especially if they someday manage to add India ($2.7T) to the mix.

>> corporations will throw money at developers who work on it, but by and large, FOSS is done by unpaid people

Money thrown by corporations is what separates successful projects, like Linux, or Apache Spark, or Postgres from niche things that no one knows or care about.

Another common scenario is big corpo developing software for internal use, and then open sourcing it, so that volunteers can do maintenance (e.g. Kubernetes)

No, it is not illegal - I've been practicing this for the last 10 years, never had any trouble with tax office.

It all depends on how your contract is written - if you have clauses that put some of the business risk on you (e.g. you give 3 month warranty on the code you write, or have some bogus penalties for contract breach, or other things, which I've never seen enforced) then it cannot be treated as full time employment, even if you have just one client for which you issue invoices.

The only thing that is an actual red flag for tax office is when you start as a full time employee, and then switch to running sole proprietorship and your previous employer remains your only client - then it is too obvious that this is just employment in disguise.

EDIT: Also, those "independent contractor" contracts come in different shapes. I, for example have just an hourly rate set, and then I get paid for the hours worked. Some people prefer to have flat monthly rate, and even some paid vacations included in their "B2B contracts", which makes it more suspicious.

>> I don't see how flat or even marginal income taxes disincentivize people from making more money

When you hit higher tax brackets it gets more difficult to negotiate a raise with your employer, because to get X more money for yourself you need your employer to spend 1.4X more on your salary. Flat tax rates have no such effect.

Problem is: most governments think of "pro-labor" laws as paid sick or maternity leave, labor unions privileges, or protections from being fired, e.g. mandating longer notice periods. This mostly benefit low wage workers, who lack bargaining power, but the needs of highly paid tech workers (such as no non-competes) go unnoticed.

> The EU is the biggest trading bloc in the world.

That recently changed: https://www.dw.com/en/asia-pacific-nations-sign-worlds-bigge...

> China is highly dependent on the EU and the US for trade

This is double-edged sword - EU and US are dependent on the imported goods. if the trade between China and the rest of the world stopped China would end up with abundance, and EU would be in serious trouble, not being able to buy basic things they need. Always better to have some real stuff than virtual money.

> Added to which, China can be dealt with via restructuring a trade agreement provided there is the political will. Which it looks like there is.

Except EU is already too weak to force China to do anything, and by moving carbon-intensive production outside Europe they would be giving China even more leverage...

The worst consequence of COVID will be thousands of people dying from other disease, because healthcare system focused on COVID neglected them, and the economic depression caused by lockdowns.

The worst consequence of global warming will be economic depression caused by pushing expensive and ineffective, but low-carbon technologies on us.

In both cases we would be better off doing nothing.

It's been kind of hard for me, because my visa process was impeded by USCIS. My compay has moved people to US before, under Obama presidency, and the process was much easier back then. And you're right, US is no longer a desirable place to move to, now that Biden has won.

Because Trump was all about "business", America's prosperity.

Biden is all about things I personally don't care about, like anti-COVID measures, or fighting global warming, which will very likely destroy US economically. Emigrating to a country that's on a brink of the worst crisis in its history is indeed pointless.

30k sounds like entry/mid-level salary in Central Europe. With over 10 years of experience I currently make over $90k

Also, if you take median salary in software industry, which is probably closer to $65k, in my country it buys you much better lifestyle than 200k in the Bay Area does. Me, for example, I was able to buy 2 bedroom, 900 sq ft apartment in the capital city with cash, no mortgage required. Other expenses don't really register on my radar. I'm piling up cash for early retirement.

EDIT: fixed some of my numbers.

EDIT2: After my country joined EU I never emigrated to Western Europe, because it didn't make financial sense to me. If I ever find myself emigrating to California, that would be because of the weather, not money.