toasted

Pretty negative response in this thread to one of the only countries really making serious efforts to preserve the last few remaining tracts of rainforest on earth.

absolutely love this, well done!

I've stopped buying much at all off amazon because I get it all from Aliexpress.

They package up and address individual items in shenzhen/guanzhou, stick them all in big containers, then when they reach the US/europe they deliver them by the cheapest means possible in a totally commoditised fashion. What competitive advantage does amazon.com have now? Why do all those small sellers need to exist? everything they sell is made in china anyway.

NZ

Non-US anaesthesiologist here. I love my job and relish going to work each morning. I spend almost no time on non-clinical paperwork. I work reasonable hours, have some busy on-call shifts but am generally well supported by my department. I earn good money in the state system - enough to raise a family comfortably and have a nice house, but not silly money. I pay no malpractice insurance, but pay $400 annually to a non-profit society for medico-legal cover. If I want to I can do additional private sector work to earn more (but I don't). I live in a country where a high standard of medical care and longer life expectancy is provided for less than half the per capita health spend of USA, and the public health system is so good that the private health sector really does struggle to offer much additional benefit.

There are many great examples of socialised health systems in the world, I'm not sure why the US ignores them? Some of the WSJ comments list all the problems inherent in the US system and then blame socialism for them when the problem is completely the opposite?

this applies to many of the "sharing economy" businesses.

airbnb seems to have a monopoly at present but as their listings become shown on competitor booking sites with lower fees customers will soon follow and the whole thing becomes commodified, and eventually peer2peer or non-profit/non-fee networks will win out.

the supreme type of monopolies enjoyed by facebook/ebay/amazon will not occur in these style businesses unless they can enforce exclusivity, and most (non-US) states won't allow this.

Of course I'm not saying expanding income inequality is better for the have nots. I'm just saying this may lead to some self-correction of relative earnings from labour vs. capital as wealth becomes more concentrated, although overall things are still worse for the working chump.

Perhaps rising wealth inequality leads to a larger proportion of money being stashed away in investments trying to make more money for the wealthy, and ultimately results in pathetic investment yields which create a self-balancing situation where people who actually work for their money are actually better off..

Alexa Global Rank 1,124

May have 30M users but engagement is pretty poor.

None of this post really makes much sense...

Although we are all quivering in anticipation of all these 8 thousand word essays, the fact remains that bitcoin is being used and works well.

Bitcoin (& litecoin) are the sole currencies of dark net drug trade, which is a large, exponentially growing business. Bitcoin is working very effectively in the wild, and all the dorky conjecture doesn't change that.

I only vaguely understand stellar (and ripple), but one thing i do know is that for all the hype over the last few years noone ever used ripple for anything other than speculation. Stellar is also shaping up in a similar way.

USA has 281 lawyers per 100,000, britain 94, japan 7.

Lawyers will become as powerful in society as you let them become.

i agree about the arms race, however block reward halving will diminish electricity requirements in a stepwise fashion and lessen the impact of this problem over time

Can americans explain to me why cable companies seem to have a monopoly on internet in the USA when presumably most houses still have copper phone lines capable of running VDSL connections capable of 52mbps?

In a truly competitive market, at some stage government would step in and break monopolies. For instance, they would go to Ebay and say, "look, you need to pool all your auction listings with other online auction companies, so they have access to yours and you display theirs", forcing them to actually compete on price and service.

And wikipedia is a non-commercial web app. There isn't really a blurred line - either it is for the common good or it is for profit.

They use first-mover advantage to create long-lasting, high-margin monopolies with persisting returns completely out of proportion to the value they add.

In drug patents, the company gets 12 years to make revenue from its innovation.. why should ebay get an eternity?

In the San Fran startup world where iphone taxi requesting and self-deleting video clips for 14 yr olds are the cusp of innovation, thank god for bitcoin and all the fun that comes with it.