unabridged

As a spiritual predecessor I would recommend the movie The Long Goodbye (1973)

The strategy they are describing (selling covered calls) is actually less risky than holding the underlying. They make more than just holding the underlying when it drops or stays flat, and in exchange they make less when the underlying goes up a lot.

Options are just a tool that lets you dial in the amount of risk you want, they can be set up to be more conservative or more risky than the underlying. The latter is what makes the news.

Nontech companies are only using spreadsheets, forms, and storage. But they spend their technical manpower on implementing business logic in closed source locked-in expensive software. I don't think its much more work just to implement the business logic in excel/google sheets and serverless functions, and end up with something much much cheaper and much more portable.

It may be my pure naivety about management software, but I assume it just consists of spreadsheets, forms, secure login, data storage, and simple queries. I cannot imagine anything with this combination that couldn't be implemented in Google Sheets (and workspaces, and a handful of other google cloud apis) for at most $20 a month per user.

Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by <40 yr olds ever paying $100k+ a year to VMWare, Symantec, Oracle, ...

To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

Hacker News has a really good dedicated search engine:

https://hn.algolia.com/

I don't think regulation is the answer. The US government should just create app.gov with a 1% fee or something and out compete them.

Hardware. If Firefox had a phone to compete with Android, even if was $1000+ it would gain ground. Also selling laptops to compete against Chromebooks.

The hardware has to be top of the line and work perfectly with the OS. Work with every major linux distro to make sure they are compatible with no fuss. Only make one or two models total. Rally the entire opensource openhardware community around a single high end model. No companies working on their own lines, but allow any manufacturer to release a phone or sell parts that match spec.

You are missing the most important point C) the outgoing president refuses to leave

The rioters wouldn't have ended democracy, but if they caused enough commotion to prevent certification there was a significant risk Trump would have taken advantage of the situation.

If they used and published a fair algorithm for matching, they wouldn't really be involved in the matching they would just be providing a venue. Similar to a city providing public space for people to meet, like a fair.

Do you think the FBI, NSA, etc doesn't already have access to photos posted on dating sites in the US?

Instead of regulation, I'd like to see the government offer a free service. A digital commons. In this case the public library version of Tinder, with strict rules of who can be banned and where everyone is treated equally.

>bullish on blockchain technology (which I see as basically git with trust/consensus features built in)

Blockchain and smart contracts are the perfect technology for managing a company's assets and voting rights, especially for startups. Imagine how much lower the risk for investors would be if the terms of share creation and dilution where completely spelled out in code. Option grants and lockup periods could be completely visible. Trading/hedging/derivatives could be available for even the smallest companies. Very tiny minimum investments could be taken with almost no overhead.

ICOs have the right idea, but they are just 99% scam illegal security offerings. An SEC sanctioned version of an ICO that is tied to real shares in a company would be a game changer.

I would be surprised if Cisco went bankrupt overnight, but to me their future looks quite bleak. Every day less companies need to buy their hardware as more move to the cloud. The biggest tech companies can build their own hardware. And the hardware isn't extremely technically advanced enough to prevent commodity competitors.

So one day if the revenue begins shrinking and they double down by going into debt to expand, then yes they could be facing bankruptcy just like Nortel.

The first response to this should be "oh, so you are making me a partner". Family = shared ownership.

I've always wanted to see soccer played with two balls on the field. I think it would be many times more interesting.

Tether doesn't hold arbitrary crypto (except a small amount to pay transaction fees on the blockchain). They are just a window where you can exchange tether tokens on the blockchain for USD in a bank account. The exchange of tether tokens with other crypto is decentralized and handled by the participants.

The US government really doesn't use this much capital control in the current financial system. Look at the fx markets, look at all the dollar denominated bonds and paper issued by foreign companies and governments. They don't need to control each transaction, they just want to know where each transaction is coming & going.

>The Fed will never run on blockchain, imagine someone guessing the private key.

This is not a worry, if they lost a key they could just rollback to a previous good state and replace with a new token. This happens frequently on ethereum.

The US government currently doesn't care if I sell billions of USD and buy JPY instead, as long as I pay the proper taxes and they can see the transaction. I imagine crypto will be treated the same way, they just want to monitor the on/off ramps. Stablecoins are just a giant decentralized on/off ramp which they wish to bring into compliance.

>So, instant payments are coming in the next 18 months [3] (it is actively in testing currently with a handful of participants), and free accounts for everyone is a stroke of legislative pen. What's blockchain solving?

Blockchain will still solve the problem of currency losing value by unlimited printing.

You should be thinking about what problems will retail banking and payment processors be solving. An easy to use CBDC will render many of them unnecessary.

Why would the people running Tether not just park the money in a US Treasury ladder and collect the millions in interest each year? No hassle, no loss of sleep. Why play games? Why risk blowing up your cash cow and going to jail?

This is an extremely low valuation for how famous BD is. They could have gone public and sold 10-20% of their stock for $1B.

99.9% of the interactions with the internet should be read-only and could be delivered via something like IPFS. Make browsers read-only by default and closely monitor when information is sent out.

The difference is the treatment of poor & homeless. Public transit buildings/vehicles are some of the only inside spaces where they can spend time. Then people with enough money avoid public transit as much as possible. Then they vote against more funding for transit because it is not useful to them.

I think its just pure fear selling off way too much. The stock market only appeared to be on a huge bull run, the amount of money in the system doubled since 2008: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S

Since 2008 money means something different. The fed will keep releasing liquid funds for banks to buy up all the cheap stock. Or the US government might even give away money to keep consumer spending going. Either way it will expand the money supply enough until the SP500 goes back to 3000 even if 3000 equals 1500 in 2019 money.

Easy. Cut bandwidth costs. Even just putting everyone at the lowest price and removing all tiers would change the market completely.

>Until the Democratic Party and liberals admit to these things, moderate their tone, I am never, never, never coming back, and I voted for Obama twice.

I always find this argument fascinating. "Some people made fun of white males, therefore low income people shouldn't get healthcare/college".

I dislike identity politics too, but I don't let it change my values.

Not completely magical realism, but I would suggest Vonnegut. Murakami slightly reminds me of a younger version.

Decentralized trust is a way to "open source" a customer/merchant database. If centralized trust is required the company controlling it can charge people to use it, for example think of listing fees as ebay charging people for access to their seller ratings. Or uber charging people to access its driver ratings.

With decentralized trust we could create a decentralized uber, where drivers get 99% of the money and 1% going to developers and providers of decentralized insurance.

One alternative to decentralized trust would be setting up a nonprofit to control the trust database, but then you are relying on the government to enforce that the nonprofit doesn't gouge the customers, manipulate the ratings, or embezzle the funds. You are basically just pushing the trust onto courts and law enforcement.

Part of me is hoping this is in preparation of releasing an open source version of windows

Not one mention of an ETF (ie the availability of bitcoin to retail investors). The large run up in December was in anticipation of multiple bitcoin ETFs by major companies, the futures market was just the appetizer. And the fall was caused by the SEC putting them on hold.