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Interestingly, I went the other way. Once I found myself ‘addicted’ to screens I got a nice automatic to check time with, and found that it really helped wean me off screens (I can set down my phone now and not look at it all day, and my quality of life and sleep have improved)

This isn’t necessarily true outside the US. The running joke about Greeks is that they are 98% Greek Orthodox (official stats from a while ago) and 40% atheist. You might be atheist and communist (a fairly common combo in Greece) but will still probably roast a lamb on Easter with your family.

Not really - you need thousands of pounds of ordinance to sink a destroyer and no small UAV is carrying that.

US Navy destroyers are equipped with CIWS and AA missiles designed to engage multiple supersonic sea skimming cruise missiles simultaneously. If the destroyers had felt that they were in any danger they would have quickly made mincemeat out of the UAVs. Still curious to know who operated their (fairly capable) drones in such a brazen manner though.

They could go to anyone important who is under investigation/has been indicted but doesn’t know it yet, tell them, then have them do things (data dump from your employer, etc) in exchange for help fleeing the US to Russia.

Good question. Treasury and FCC are VERY different departments. FCC is ~1k people and dominated by political commissioners. Treasury is ~80k people and has politically appointed leadership but also a much deeper bench of career civil servants. Those people will read those comments and will make changes to their proposed rules based on thoughtful comments and feedback from stakeholders. They may not make the change you want, but they will read your feedback and take it into account. If you do choose to comment, DO NOT use form letters or go on rants. Establish your interest, perspective, and authority, and state your position clearly with supporting data. And remember: everything you say goes into the public record

Source: got a large US govt to tweak regs based on data, common sense, 0 lobbying and 0 money.

Speaking from personal experience, it is necessary to update these references, because people implementing them have no choice but to follow the letter of the law. I have worked on govt projects where we had to downgrade to an insecure cipher suite to comply with outdated regulations.

Putting on my govt contractor hat, there may be a business opportunity here to set up VMs running Win95/Netscape Communicator for use by all the civil servants looking to comply with the law. Could charge a pretty penny too - it’ll all get budgeted as “Brexit compliance” costs.

Another example related to children - in 1993 guidance changed from having children sleep on their front to having them sleep on their backs. The result was a reduction in SIDS deaths from 0.13% to 0.035%. However the rate of kids having a flat spot on the back of their heads increased to 47% of 2 month olds. That flat spot pushes the rest of their skull forward and can result in a prominent forehead and misshapen features (iow, makes your kid ugly). Is the trade off between a 0.1% reduction in death rate worth a 50% chance of being ugly?

The bigger problem from a societal perspective is that the “people cowering in fear” often includes the Dept of Justice. Prosecutors are assessed based on win rates, and they know how hard it is to go after a large company with the best lawyers. In some cases, the prosecutors personally know the people at those law firms, and remember them as the best students in their law school class. Would you go after a large firm protected by someone you know is smarter (and better at law) than you? Much easier to focus on the obvious scams and easy wins. This was part of how Goldman got away scot free with extremely questionable behavior like betting against their clients during the Great Recession, or UBS got away with just a fine for laundering cartel money (they sized their teller windows to fit the shoeboxes full of cash that the cartels were bringing in!).

Per other note, everyone in the space does it. It’s a fairly commodity business so paying more or keeping people all year when there are only two months of work would put them out of business quickly. If anything it’s a flaw in the underlying law that creates that seasonality

Unfortunately everyone in the space does it. Hiring 200 FT with benefits that you only have work for during two months a year will quickly put you out of business.

I used to work at a company that hired temps off Craigslist to do fairly sensitive healthcare work. The economics and extreme seasonality made that the only viable approach. Software like this was absolutely critical to limiting what people could do and preventing things like identity theft etc. Strong deterrent effect too- during orientation they would show people exactly what they could see. Not great in a general work environment with FTEs but these tools have legitimate uses.

It’s a violation of the patient’s privacy and unprofessional.

From the Kaiser Principles of Responsibility:

“discuss patient information: - only when it is required to do your job”

https://www.providers.kaiserpermanente.org/info_assets/cpp_c...

Random HN readers may not be able to identify this person, but one of their coworkers might. How would you feel if you went to the hospital with suspicious symptoms during the height of epidemic hysteria and one of the employees started posting tidbits about you on the Internet?

How many people might avoid going to the hospital with symptoms of this or something else because they don’t want to risk a gossiping employee outing then on the Internet?

I clicked that link expecting Linus Torvalds and was very confused. The mononym "Linus" is already taken :-) It would be very exciting to see Linus Torvalds playing with giant amounts of RAM but sadly he doesn't seem to make a lot of videos like that.

Just to reinforce that this is correct and to add detail - the Deputy Chief of Mission is the senior career foreign service person responsible for actual embassy operations.

The Faithful Executioner is a great book with a lot of detail from a primary source (the executioners diary over several decades) on law, order and punishment in 16th century Nuremberg. All the punishments are fairly pedestrian - hanging, flogging, branding, etc. with a handful of ‘creative’ ones that stand out enough to warrant special mention in the diary. Note that while the executioner obviously performed capital punishment he was also responsible for carrying out less severe punishment as well. Now maybe other places had more sadistic executioners but that kind of behavior would have attracted notice - they were public servants who answered to local government.

Stepping back, societies often struggle with managing the behavior of the instruments of public order. There seems to be an inherent tension between tasking people with dealing with society’s “undesirables” and bad behavior and also having them behave as model citizens themselves.

An interesting read is, “The Faithful Executioner” about 16th century Nuremberg. The book is heavily based on contemporary sources. The town archers, who are responsible for law enforcement, often cause trouble through drunkenness, excessive violence, and general bad behavior, and are rarely held accountable except for the most egregious offenses. An interesting parallel that points to that broader tension.

The core issue is that ridership data is a key piece the cities need to craft a tax on ride-sharing, and to tailor the tax to help their financially challenged public transit entities. Uber knows that if they give up scooter use data the city will immediately request it for ride sharing as well. The privacy question conveniently aligns with Uber’s position, but I doubt that this is Uber’s core concern vs avoiding every major city banging on the rideshare piñata to fund the gigantic debt service payments and generous benefit programs for their underutilized public transit systems.

When the ACA passed, mandating that large employers offer health insurance to all full time employees, there was a massive push by large employers in retail and food service to cap people's hours and make sure very few qualified as full time. This was because health insurance costs employers about $10k per employee per year, and if you are paying someone $10/hr ($20k/yr at 40hrs a week), raising labor costs 50% is a nonstarter.

An outcome like that may be possible here as an unintended consequence, with Uber and Lyft capping most drivers at 20hrs a week, and full time drivers splitting their time between the two (20hrs for each).

This is great. Break Google up intro search, corporate services (G Suite, GCP), YouTube, Android and a few others. Then, split Facebook into Instagram and FB. Amazon into retail (split further by category?) and AWS.

This will trigger a new wave of innovation. As smaller businesses, more innovations will be big enough to move the needle and will therefore be worth pursuing. Competitors will emerge - the giants are strangling their innovative competition in the crib right now, and we are all missing out as a result.

Breaking up standard oil and ma bell had very positive results. Glad to see some movement on breaking up anti competitive monopolies again.

I worked in the trading dept of a large hedge fund and this could easily be them, or someone like them. They regularly traded several billion in bonds, currencies and short rates each day and just aren't used to those trades posting publicly (outside the exchange). I can see them seeing this Twitter thread, scratching their head and wondering, "what's the big deal?"

To add to that, I have seen billions of dollars in EMD traded off an Excel model that took 30 minutes to run (come in to work, hit F9 to recalc / pull in updated market data) go get coffee, come back, send trades to trading desk

In addition to your point about leverage and underlying asset volatility, certain assets are not regularly marked to market (real estate being a prime example) and so you don't experience the true volatility of the asset unless you attempt to sell it.

As a concrete example, a number of commercial real estate investors were technically insolvent in 2008-2009, with assets worth less than the balances of the loans used to buy them. They just pursued the 'hear no evil/see no evil/speak no evil' approach and marked to book (what they paid for the asset) until the market recovered. This approach is aided by the multi-year nature of commercial leases, which protects the cash flows needed for debt service (as long as your tenants stay in business).

In aggregate these factors allow professional real estate investors to consistently earn return by taking on a ton of leverage and with it huge but disguised risk. Back to the original point of the article (buying to rent), most retail investors don't necessarily have the float/access to debt to weather that volatility, and their cash flows are more sensitive which compounds that risk.