CBC agreement with talent agency prohibits use of Creative Commons music - <AUTHOR> http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/08/cbc-agreement-with-t.html <comment><USER2> See comment #20 [http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/08/cbc-agreement- with-t.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/08/cbc-agreement- with-t.html#comment-906362) for an explanation from the CBC.

<comment><USER3> tl;dr: Most music licensed under Creative Commons disallows commercial use. So, almost all authors are prohibiting the CBC from using their work.

<comment><USER4> Have there been any surveys done to see what CC licenses are in use?

I mean in any case it seems a little silly that one would ban all of them and not just ones marked "noncommercial."</comment></comment></comment>


Italy's Coronavirus Lockdown Tests the Limits of Democracy - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-09/italy-s-coronavirus-lockdown-tests-the-limits-of-democracy <comment><USER2> Working from Milan, the last tests of the day are running in the terminal below this browser.

I'm definitely not happy not to be able to move freely (I like to go bicycling in the countryside and it's Spring) but, to be fair, the only way not to spread the virus is not to let people move around too much. Some politicians here want more restrictions in the areas they administer, others want less. The bet seems to be: we take a big economic hit now instead of a larger one later on if we let the virus run unchecked. Maybe other European countries are taking the opposite bet by not testing for the virus extensively or they are really only at the beginning of the curve. I don't have elements so I won't go further into this. Maybe somebody from other countries will add information about it.

About the reaction of the people here. I asked questions in chat groups of people I meet in RL (Italy is a WhatsApp country). Some 80-90% support these restrictions. Some want more, China style. The news today are that the government will deploy patrols to check people crossing city borders and that they are checking the people at train stations for fever.

The roads are much emptier than usual, probably like what they used to be during the summer vacations many years ago. No problem finding a seat on any kind of public transport. No more supermarket runs, that happened two weeks ago. Restaurants and bars are open only 9-18 but they point is that once you close theaters, cinemas, gims, etc, there is little for people to go to. It's really home-work-home for most of us.

It's going to be a long March, maybe a long April too. Anyway, my parents did they primary school during WW2 with bombs falling from the sky (10k people dead in this city) so this doesn't look as bad.

<comment><USER3> May Gods grace be with you, your city, and your people. LOVE

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It does not.

Democracy does not mean doing whatever one wants with no possibility of restrictions in exceptional circumstances.

I have seen several articles lately that try to paint quarantines, lock-downs, or other temporary restrictions as anti-democratic. This is a fallacy and it is not helpful at all.

</comment><comment><USER5> > _Italy's steps are less limiting than one might have anticipated. The > government is letting people move around the affected areas, and even to > leave them, for work- or health-related reasons. Rome says it will fine or > arrest those who break the rules, but it will be difficult to patrol such a > vast area. Individuals will only need a written statement to prove that > they're traveling for work — a system that's open to abuse._

The last few words seem like an understatement. It looks like they are trying to strike a balance between competing needs. Even if the attempts at restriction are not effective at stopping motivated individuals from traveling, at the very least these policies further bolster cultural norms discouraging movement and encouraging social distancing.

<comment><USER6> More like politicians need to look like they are doing something.

These days it's hard being in charge when the herd starts panicing. You have to cook up all kinds of bullshit whether it's possible or not to prevent mass madness.

<comment><USER5> Yes, absolutely. I wasn't trying to suggest the actual motive, just note a possibly beneficial side effect.

At the same time, there will be massive unintended negative side effects caused directly by the impeded movement, particular for people with existing medical problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been trying to find a source to clarify and have come up empty: what happened in Italy that they were hit so disproportionately hard relative to other countries?

<comment><USER8> \- Older population

\- lot of heavy smokers

\- the typical european old people attitude (and i'm saying that as a european too): "you don't take me anywhere". My grandparents passed away long ago but they never went to doctor only in the very last minute all the time. It's a kind of mentality and you can see that in the Italy cases. When they take people to the hospital and they die the next day it means they had a heavy fever for a week or more already. They have been sick for a long time but no, we don't go to the hospital. That's why what South Korea does is important, 20k tests daily, and they have done 200k already.

<comment><USER9> All three may account for higher number of fatalities, but not for the speed of the virus spreading.

There is no real evidence that smokers or older people more easily get the virus, and of course if they stayed put at home they did not contribute to the spreading (they had no or however less contacts).

<comment><USER8> As bryanrasmussen pointed out physical contact is also more common on meeting, especially kiss on the cheek. Like that's how you greet everyone and the best way to spread viruses

I've never been to the US but I don't think kiss on the cheek is that common there.

<comment><USER10> I see a kiss on the cheek as a greeting in the US about once a year, usually between two visiting Europeans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think they are not enough, and that instead everyone should be forced to stay home and only go out if it's essential for their own or for other people's survival (e.g. buying food, working at jobs related to medicine, food, utilities, etc.); furthermore all non-essential travel (i.e. pretty much everything except delivering supplies) should also be blocked.

Currently people are, in part, still going to work even at non-essential jobs, non-essential shops are still open and enforcement is very limited.

<comment><USER5> I agree this would be a good policy in this case, but in my opinion the real issue is "what should our general policy be for empowering leaders to make this decision, and on what basis."

I support the lock down in Italy because I am convinced of the threat of the virus. However, I can imagine an alternative scenario in which a viral threat is exaggerated and a lock down is used to consolidate political power.

<comment><USER11> A transmissible disease that has already overwhelmed hospitals in another country and is spreading uncontrollably in yours seems a good criteria.

<comment><USER5> Yes, and we would need to either clearly, objectively define "overwhelmed" and "uncontrollably" or designate people authorized to make this categorization. (Or both).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Watch LegalEagle's video. Quarantining people is completely legal in the US.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think Bloomberg misses the basics of human psychology here.

People look for strong leadership in times of panic and fear. Sometimes to their detriment. But I would be surprised if a majority is not for stronger measures when they think of their loved ones, and themselves.

</comment><comment><USER14> [https://archive.md/KNzyq](https://archive.md/KNzyq)

</comment><comment><USER15> Wait until we make attempts to control the spread in the US. Things are about to get really interesting. Based on timelines from other countries, we're probably 1-6, closer to 1-3 weeks away from full outbreak and severe containment measures.

<comment><USER7> The likeliest scenario in the US is that (at the federal level at least) we won't try to contain it beyond perfunctory measures. People will just get sick and die. Hospitals will experience shortages and we'll try to back-stop those shortages via capitalistic solutions. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of even stories of straight-up bribery for hospital access to come up some years after this is all over.

Be it cancer or COVID-19, the US default attitude to healthcare in general is very "Whatever happens to a person, happens. Can't control it." One could even, uncharitably, point to the origins of the country and suggest that there's a critical mass of people who look at health crises, shrug, and go "God's will."

<comment><USER16> Right now the US in a relatively short span of time has gone from having no testing (due almost exclusively to government regulation) to having broad testing availability (thanks to free markets).

> People will just get sick and die

People may get COVID-19, but in general I would anticipate the rate of severe outcomes to be lower than we've seen given both the physical distance between people in the US versus more dense areas and the higher distribution of healthcare - we just have a lot more hospitals per person than China does.

> Hospitals will experience shortages and we'll try to back-stop those > shortages via capitalistic solutions

That may happen, but Hospitals are also free to invest heavily in having their own supplies and we've already seen companies start shipping supplies in bulk. We are better positioned to address shortages than most other nations.

> I wouldn't rule out the possibility of even stories of straight-up bribery > for hospital access to come up some years after this is all over.

That is far fetched and not tied to reality.

> we won't try to contain it beyond perfunctory measures

It would be surprising to see a formal quarantine. It is more likely some areas will have recommended quarantines and in general social distancing will be heavily encouraged.

<comment><USER17> We do not have more hospital beds than China does. China is at 4.3 hospital beds per 1,000 people. In the US we are at 2.7. Italy is at 3.18. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_ho...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_OECD_countries_by_hospital_beds)

There's been no evidence so far that our social distancing measures have done anything to slow this down, and at the rate it's growing we will absolutely run out of hospital capacity at some point (and that's just regular beds, not to mention oxygen, masks and PPE for the hospital staff, or ICU beds for the critically ill).

A formal quarantine is just a matter of time.

<comment><USER18> Comparing quantity of hospital beds is a bit of a red herring. Having been in hospital beds in three countries on three continents (US, Brazil and China), I'd take the US hospital beds over the other two every single time. Much better beds, much better equipment, much better training, much better practices, processes and protocols.

<comment><USER19> It doesn't really matter how good the bed is if there isn't one left for you.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


If War Can Have Ethics, Wall Street Can, Too - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/03/opinion/if-war-can-have-ethics-wall-street-can-too.html?_r=00 <comment><USER2> Historically the idea of war having rules has had a very unfortunate past. In WW1, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare in 1915 and torpedoed the passenger liner Lusitania (filled with neutral civilians). There's a long list [1] of hospital ships deliberately sunk in WW1.

Then in WW2, aside from even more unrestricted submarine warfare and sinkings of hospital ships [2], we also have the firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and every other major axis city; machine-gunning of shipwreck survivors in the water; the atom bombs; the impressment of Koreans into service as "comfort women" for Japanese servicemen; forced labor at both axis & allied prisoner camps; the internment of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps; and of course the Holocaust.

Modern-day, there's the My Lai massacre and Obama's attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital [3]. Probably more too, but you don't hear about them.

The author cites that war has rules because _rules are written down_ , but rules are written down for Wall Street as well. They're just not enforced. And similarly, the laws of war are only enforced on the losing side, or on scapegoats that the actual decision-makers make available as a token sacrifice. When it comes to actually conducting a war, belligerents usually follow just one rule: win.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in_World_War_I)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospital_ships_sunk_in_World_War_II)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike)

<comment><USER3> [http://www.centenarynews.com/article?id=1616](http://www.centenarynews.com/article?id=1616) My understanding is that the Americans were using these ships to carry arms. Is it even in debate anymore that the Lusitania was carrying arms anymore?

Hiding bombs under orphans and sick folks is dirty business I recall how much we criticized the Iraqis for doing the same.

<comment><USER2> My point is that in times of war, belligerents on all sides will resort to dirty business regardless of what the rules of war say. If the Lusitania was carrying arms (which I'd vaguely heard and have no reason to doubt), that'd support my point.

<comment><USER4> Honestly, I'm not sure if you're trolling.

Your first post went on at length (and with sources!) about how rules aren't worth anything because they'd be broken anyway. Example: German submarines attacking a civilian ship in WWI.

Unfortunately you missed the most important point in your story - which is that this ship wasn't so innocent and civilian after all. Rather than ignoring the rules, the Germans broke them in retaliation AFTER the Americans had done so first.

The message here is not "rules never work", as your first post implies. It's rather "if you (US) brake the rules, expect the others (Germany) to do so as well in retaliation."

The fact that Lusitania was carrying arms does not support your initial point but rather changes the story and implications entirely.

<comment><USER2> I said nothing about whether rules aren't worth anything or not. I said that they _will_ be broken.

The former is a normative statement. The latter is a positive one. A lot of my comments here attempt to describe the world as I've observed it, not the world as I'd like it to be. I have plenty of opinions about how I'd like it to be, as well, but I usually don't share them because opinions are like assholes: everybody has one but thinks that others' stinks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wallstreet has rules. They're just not enforced. People would be shocked if they knew, for instance, how many hedge funds simply operate on a model of "black edge" insider trading.

<comment><USER6> I'd be interested in hearing more about how these firms get away with this kind of thing. I interned at an investment firm last year and the lawyer who worked in their compliance department told me how detailed, thorough, and stringent the audit that was done by the SEC the year before I got there was. Keep in mind, this was a small firm. Do larger firms have some way of keeping those kinds of things secret? Sorry if I'm misinterpreting something here, I have almost no financial knowledge as I worked in the tech department as a programmer.

<comment><USER7> I work in an area of finance technology connected to this process. It's no different than escalation in any other form of criminality. Cops wear armor, criminals buy armor-piercing rounds. Auditors looks deeper, so the pertinent information is masked deeper.

At this point, the major gap in our financial regulatory process is at the detection layer, not the investigations layer. If you can keep specific scenarios under wraps, you can avoid things quite easily, especially if the scenarios you do cover are impressively complex and thorough. So you hire PhDs in math and physics to identify and create your algorithms. They do a great job identifying scenarios where known criminal activity occurs, but they aren't informed on the specific, complicated, and should-be-totally-illegal actions your firm is engaged in, so they are basically shooting in the dark with no chance of finding the real misdeeds. These algorithms are genius-level complex, greatly reducing the number of government employees that will be able to decipher them. You create hundreds or thousands of them, making it prohibitively difficult for anyone in a regulatory agency to take the time to understand them all, then you assure the regulators you have all your bases covered. You show them the evidence of all the wrongdoing you've identified (also an insurmountable mountain of data) and if you do not leave any glaring holes, they have to nod and walk away.

Financial regulations are important, but the idea that regulators could every truly keep the financial markets from abusing the rest of us is nonsense. They can only do so much.

<comment><USER8> What if the policy was that once a year, a set amount of people will be prosecuted? Kind of like setting quotas for speeding tickets... Where firms are ranked in terms of the volume/egregiousness of the actions committed.

Oh, and setup an anonymous tip-line. To allow other firms to "investigate" others in order to make themselves look better (might not happen every year, but I'd imagine it would be an option of last resort if something really bad needed to be covered).

Shady things will still happen, but there will be attempts to reduce it just enough so others take the hit. Plus, the public gets a few show trials to make them believe the regulators have teeth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an interesting and broad analogy which I hadn't heard of before.

The military, at the end of the day, is a tool (famously, another tool of diplomacy). Either it's useful or not. Likewise finance is a tool (fundamentally a service industry like gardening or medicine). We support it because it helps finance business, helps people manage their pensions etc. Sometimes sidelines are useful too (DARPA, gun hobbyists, weird financial instruments that increase liquidity for everyone).

Yet lately the ends have been forgotten and the means elevated. The recent US proposed budget suggests increasing expenditures but there is no discussion as to whether that would be useful or not (and thus whether the increase is unnecessary, too big to even too small). The same problem has emerged in Finance: the point of an financial instrument is the instrument itself. HFT that skims a bit out of the transaction (thus is worse for the fundamental buyer and seller) is considered good. etc.

<comment><USER10> People who have memorized the "marketmaking is essential" arguments for HFT may disagree with you. People who dislike arguments from "does this serve its stated purpose for society" may reject your argumentation style. I think you've got a hell of a point on both sides.

If a teeny-tiny fraction of a percentage or a penny flat tax would cause a trade to not be profitable in expectation, then that trade probably never had anything to do with the real economy in the first place.

<comment><USER11> HFT takes market share from market makers and reduces spread sizes. I don't know where your strawman is from, but you're missing the point.

<comment><USER12> Isn't "reduces spread sizes" a fancy way of saying that when a big pension fund decides to move a billion dollars from Coke to Pepsi, they pay slightly more to do so than they would if HFT didn't exist? That's what people mean when they complain about HFT affecting retail investors (as opposed to someone selling 100 shares of something on Etrade).

<comment><USER11> What no, it means they pay less. They sell coke and get slightly more, and buy Pepsi and get a slightly lower price.

Instead of say, Coke being at 194.01 bid and 194.02 ask, that might narrow to 194.012 bid and 194.018 ask. If you trade in that market, you're better off.

The loser is the company previously making the market, which had been buying at 194.01 and selling at 194.02.

There are more complicated ways in which HFTs can indeed be at odds with institutional investors. See e.g. [https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-03-31/michael-l...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-03-31/michael- lewis-doesn-t-like-high-frequency-traders)

But if they couldn't adjust their price so fast, the spreads would be higher in the first place to account for the risk.

Nobody has the right, or should have the right, to sell a billion dollars in any market without moving the market before it's over. Why should someone take the other side of that trade, knowing the price will crash as soon as it's over?

<comment><USER12> All of these details sound plausible, but as whole this (the assertion that the profit made by HFT comes primarily at the expense of other market makers) smells wrong. If that assertion were true, it would seem to imply that market- making is less profitable today than in the past. Is that the case? I was under the impression that it was more profitable.

<comment><USER11> Virtu is a huge market maker. They are/were 3-5% of all equity trades in the US [0]. They make $200 million a year in profit [1].

[0] [https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/VirtuOverv...](https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/VirtuOverview.pdf)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtu_Financial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtu_Financial)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Frankly I don't see the point of these meaningless articles. You have a financial system which is akin to a police force whose commanders are chosen by the drug dealers, and the police employ former drug dealers on the grounds that haven been drug dealers, they know more about the drug business and they can turn their knowledge to fighting the drug war.

After a few years in drug enforcement the ex drug dealers return to work for their gangs, taking all the knowledge from working in drug enforcement with them, not to mention that they were still receiving dividends and profits from the the drug dealers who previously employed them during their stint in drug enforcement.

I really can't comprehend why any intelligent people can expect this depraved, corrupt farcical system to work. Now you have Trump, unashamedly pro-business (ie leaving the inmates in control of the asylum) and people seriously expect things to get better.

Here are your brave American presidents who can bravely and patriotically authorize the executions (ie murder) of alleged terrorists in Yemen and Afghanistan who have done diddly squat to Americans, but can't/won't a lift a finger against corrupt predatory malign financiers whose actions leave Americans indebted, dying prematurely because they can't afford good housing and good health care. Compare the deaths of Americans due to terrorism by Yemenis or Somalis, and the premature deaths of Americans due to poverty and ill-health which these banksters frauds have worsened, and tell me who Trump should be executing without any meaningful evidence or even a trial.

I am sorry but due to their corrupt financial system the politicians of the Western world are becoming more and more of a joke.

</comment><comment><USER14> If war can have ethics, can the Times have ethics? If the times CAN have ethics, why did it report this headline:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international- students...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students-us- colleges-trump.html)

for this study?

[http://www.aacrao.org/docs/default- source/TrendTopic/Immigra...](http://www.aacrao.org/docs/default- source/TrendTopic/Immigration/intl-survey-results-released.pdf)

(see bottom of page 1 in particular.)

Sigh.

<comment><USER15> Headline: [...] 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants

Study: 39% of responding instituions reported a decline in international applicatons

Are you complaining about a 1% difference, or the difference between "colleges" and "responding institutions"?

<comment><USER16> The study also says that 35% reported an increase so this could just be random noise. So the headline isn't directly wrong but it isn't sending an honest message.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I disagree with the author's premise: "Nearly a decade after one of the most devastating financial collapses in modern history, Wall Street appears as corrupt as ever."

Considering the size of 'Wall Street' the size of the ethics violations that he uses as an example are miniscule. In addition, due to the increased scrutiny that financial institutions face and the potential damage that scandals can cause, legitimate organizations seem less willing to risk ethics violations.

Also, unlike in war, ethics violations on Wall Street can be reported and prosecuted relatively easily.

As mentioned in many comments above - Wall Street has ethics, one can only hope that the current administration doesn't take steps to weaken threaten these.

<comment><USER18> I wonder how one could say this stuff with a straight face after witnessing the credit crisis of 2007, and the not only lack of consequences for the highly unethical and very likely illegal activities that lead to it, but also the subsequent largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich that ever took place in human history.

Bankers were literally rewarded by the system for being evil.

Many lives and families across the globe were destroyed by their actions -- be it by evictions, loss of pensions and savings that took a lifetime to build and related suicides.

Let us not whitewash all of this stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> In war, there is a benefit to treating your enemy with dignity. Treatment of prisoners, morale("we are the good guys"), etc. In Wall Street there isn't with white collar crime only getting a slap on the risk when they put millions of people on the street.

The system is broken when corruption and misdirection is not punished with the weight of their crimes.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Ethics of War" sounds like an oxymoron.

<comment><USER21> And yet it is internationally recognized to exist. Here's a video that goes into how war has more formalized ethics than, say romance. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oThh3_Srxtc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oThh3_Srxtc)

<comment><USER22> It's useful to recognize it, while simply abiding by only the parts of it which suit you. After all, if you need to, you can always ignore it and deny it.

That's the reality of war.

<comment><USER23> True, but this fatalistic view alone isn't an argument to stop trying to maintain ethical behavior even when when waging war.

<comment><USER22> Absolutely, and I didn't mean my post to come across that way. This topic makes me a bit glum, and I think that comes across as defeatist, but I'd rather take on the correct, losing fight, than not fight at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The vast majority of "wall street's" corruption is its relationship to the rent seeking opportunities that the US government makes available for them. And what's hilarious is that its the same bleeding heart liberals who demand things like the government provide low interest home loans who are shocked and outraged to learn that "wall street" commits "frauds" around them (i.e. bankers are doing what they're asked to, and when it blows up in the government's face, get scapegoated).

<comment><USER25> You've used a lot of incendiary language here but I am struggling to find a concrete point.

What rent seeking opportunities? Who are "bleeding heart liberals" and what "demands" are you talking about?

What fraud are you talking about specifically? Who was scapegoated? What should have happened, in your view?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This seems like a reasonable place to start a discussion, but hard to assess without real proposals. If I had to guess at what he is suggesting it seems to argue for all risk to be borne by the company, which really seems like an argument for less risk taking and more consolidation, not too surprising from a military man, but pretty anathema to technologists.

</comment><comment><USER27> Standard ignorant and hyperbolic discourse about Wall Street.

> When faced with illegal or immoral orders, it is the duty of professional > soldiers to refuse such orders. When such a refusal occurs, it is followed > by thorough investigations, and potentially courts-martial or war crimes > prosecutions for those who issue such orders. In the case of the former > Wells Fargo employees, the opposite occurred. Imagine the moral and societal > hazard if the military permitted such retaliation against those who reported > illegal and immoral behaviors.

Well's Fargo is a bank that makes money by selling financial products to people including bank accounts and credit cards. To do this they employ salespeople. These salespeople are tasked with selling these products, as much as they can. They have a compliance department that explicitly says "don't lie to people when you sell to them". The salespeople broke those rules in order to meet the sales goals, so they were fired. The way the author writes this article, it's as if they think it is immoral to be a salesman and that the executives of Wells Fargo should be court marshaled for requiring them to sell a lot of things. The analogy, and to equate selling things with war crimes on the battlefield is absurd.

> Hedge funds and investment banks utilize high-speed trading to place the > individual investor at an insurmountable disadvantage.

It's unclear what the author mean's by "high-speed" trading here, I assume they mean high-frequency market making, but most hedge funds are not in high frequency market making business. Does the author know what they are talking about? Probably not. High frequency market-makers like Virtu and Hudson River are in the high-frequency market making business. And it's unclear how high- frequency market making hurts the individual investor, it's much more concrete how high frequency market makers hurt the banks (old-school market makers) and _help_ the individual investor by closing down the bid-ask spread.

Even if hedge funds were employing techniques to put an individual investor at a disadvantage, isn't that their _job_? Hedge funds are in the business because they can presumably make better trades than average, and so anyone who is on the other side of the trades they are making is presumably going to be losing out. This would be like challenging an NFL team to a football game and complaining that their wide receivers are too good athletes. And why should we prioritize the "individual investor" over institutional investors? A pension fund handles money for retired pensioners, while an individual investor might be some dentist day-trader - why should we prioritize his well being over the pensioners? He presumably has enough disposable income already.

<comment><USER28> Wells Fargo destroyed sales peoples careers for calling attention to their (WF) illegal behavior. [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/28/499805238/episode-732-bad- form-wells-fargo)

If someone trains for 5-10 years in a career, and then a company retaliates by putting a hidden, un-removable "black mark" on their record preventing them from employment in said career is despicable. It's not a war crime, but it's pretty close.

<comment><USER27> Suppression of whistle-blowers is a different crime and certainly isn't concentrated in Wall Street or even private industry (see Snowden, Uber).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> You mean like white phosphorus and depleted uranium? Those kind of ethics? Not sure I want Wall Street having those kind of ethics.

</comment><comment><USER30> The article's premise is that war is vicious yet moral, so something less vicious like wall street has no right to complain that morality is a second level concern.

A king not killing another king is moral between kings, but those that followed the loser can suffer greatly. The closer you get to becoming god, the more callous the hands gambled.

The definition of being god here is how effective you are at controlling perceptions, how your followers perceive reality, your personal religion in a way.

So from the peasants view, the kings and gods are corrupt, removed from reality. That is because the god of peasants has always been the god of livelihood, while the elites worship the god of power. The greater god ignores the lesser god.

</comment><comment><USER31> The moral police are here! The moral police are here! Wee-woo wee-woo.

The amount of moral policing these days is way too much. It seems to have grown significantly these past couple decades.

</comment><comment><USER32> It saddens me that we've gotten to the point of comparing Wall Street ethics to war ethics and even entertaining the idea that war has better ethics than Wall Street.

</comment><comment><USER33> If Wall Street can have ethics, the US government can, too.

<comment><USER34> We're all doomed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> War has ethics?

<comment><USER36> Yes, see the Geneva Conventions for a good example of an ethical code for war that signatory nations can formally agree to. [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> In war, morality is a propaganda technique to convince mothers to let their sons die hero's deaths, and to convince the young and foolhardy to join a crusade that is likely to result in their death. Periods of the biggest moral clarity in war are the periods where the propaganda is the thickest and human rationality the weakest.

To believe otherwise one must believe in forces of evil that animate one side and forces of good that animate another, which is a profoundly supernatural view.

Similarly, this article suggests that Wall Street lacks morality and uses as an example a VC considering layoffs that would occur if she fails to fund a round.

If there is a finite amount of money, an investor will invest in the firm that shows the most promise. Many teams of hard working people are seeking investment, but only some will get it. The investor must use the available information to decide where to place her bet.

If the investor is wrong, she will not be able to afford to bet again in the future. Should we all fell sorry if the investor makes a bad decision and a team of people spent several years getting paid to pursue an ill-fated idea? Arguably, the cost to society for this misstep is great, so perhaps we ought to appoint a wise _investment minister_ to make the choices judiciously on behalf of investors? Why not also appoint a hiring minister to direct job- seekers only toward the most promising startups? For that matter, why not also appoint a business strategy minister to help startups make good decisions and avoid bad ones?

While these ministerial posts sound absurd in the context of startups, this is our reality in the world of banking and housing. Ministers tell our banks how much reserve capital they ought to carry, they tell our housing market what a reasonable rate is for a 30 year mortgage, etc.

Fannie and Freddie flew under the radar for years without revealing their balance sheet, drastically altering the US (and world) economy all at the behest of a small number of officials. I think the reason this was allowed to occur was (ironically enough) to avoid financial bad news when our leaders were trying to sell a war.

When you introduce socialized risk the market cannot be counted on to prevent socialized losses. The game is changed. The normal incentives and disincentives do not apply.

After 9/11 for example, the government became the insurer of last resort for terrorism related claims. This came as a relief to anyone building a skyscraper or running an airline, but at what cost? It eliminated much of the incentive that would have existed in the economy to prevent terrorism.

We let our ministers create very bad policy. Rather than just writing poor people a check to help them get a mortgage, they create artificial demand for high risk housing loans, which creates a broad incentive for reckless expansion of a whole sector of the economy. They keep much of this risk on the government's books, making taxpayers accountable not for a simple payment to the poor person to allow him/her to get housing, but for the entire house of cards built upon those loans.

We cannot allow our government to try to address so-called "market failures" by creating _infrastructure_ that distorts and hides information from the market. Not only is it paternalistic, but it also creates a tremendous amount of risk for the whole economy.

This is not an argument against welfare. We have two options for how we can think about giving welfare, either as a cash payment (with or without strings attached, fwiw) or by greasing the core infrastructure of the economy to slip in some subprime loans among the many non-subprime loans, figuring that the risk won't really be discernible by financial markets and all will be well.

When capitalism contains a lot of incentives imposed by various government ministers, "free" economic behavior adapts to exploit those incentives. This is what the author of the article disagrees with. He thinks that we should all act genteel and avoid transactions that have moral consequences. The problem is that such transactions rarely occur, finance creates abstracted transactions that are rarely correlated with a desirable or undesirable social outcome.

In many industries (healthcare, finance, automotive, solar, etc.) government- sponsored incentives dominate free-market incentives. When we allow this to happen, we are effectively saying that we do not want individuals to have free economic choice, we instead want a select group of ministers to create a socially responsible landscape.

Welfare is distortionary, but few would argue that it is unnecessary. What _is_ very harmful is when welfare programs corrupt the infrastructure of markets and lead to widespread behavior that exploits the programs.

The goal of every industry, and of every firm is to become "essential" or "too big to fail"... in other words, to be declared to be worthy of the guaranteed support of taxpayers.

Think about it this way, if issued a credit card with very low interest and a very high limit, most people could easily become billionaires simply by using low risk investment strategies. The problem is that if for even a day, the strategy requires more of a limit than is available, the whole plan comes crashing down. Even with low-risk endeavors, losses must be covered. Without forcing firms to cover their own downside risk, they of course will leverage to the max. This is what has happened in our modern finance industry, the growth since the 1990s has been due to consolidation and increased leveraging.

FWIW I think that what is needed is a new financial statement to be added to GAAP which is a statement of risk, which recursively points to all assets and liabilities whose market risks correlate with solvency risk of other firms, so that a broad, a view of the risk a company faces (market, and systemic) that can be viewed in aggregate, so that we can more easily understand the factors that impact an entire portfolio.

Ironically, such a statement would allow Wall Street to invest most heavily in firms with socialized risk (for those are the lowest risk bets), but at least then, regulators could impose a limit on the amount of socialized risk firms were allowed to invest in, which is one of the few things that can be done to actually stop the cycle of exploitation. Firms should have an incentive _not to_ be classified as "too big to fail" and not to attempt reclassification if things go worse than expected.

</comment><comment><USER38> Bad premise war is a crime against humanity, or eh, should be.

<comment><USER39> Wars are fought not only by the aggressors. And the aggressor can be acting to prevent amoral behavior (attacking a state which is engaging in slavery/genocide of its people, but one might argue that is an act of war in the moral sense).

If one accepts that acting in a war in such a capacity is the more moral choice than inaction, then it makes sense to talk about the ethics of war, such as: when is lethal force against enemy combatants acceptable, what weapons of war have justifiable risks?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> War has ethics? That's new to me.

The fact that some "rules" are set so idiots follow them doesn't mean everybody does, specially when they are not seen. Abu ghraib anyone?

Wall street has a very clear ethics set on stone, profits no matter the loss.

<comment><USER41> War does have ethics. For example, the US military has rules of engagement. A great example of this is that the US at one point (70% sure) knew where the head of ISIS was. He was alegedly in an appartment building in a city in Syria. The US rules of engagement prevent the airforce from simply bombing an appartment building full of civilians, so they did nothing. That means a lot. It means that they don't simply bomb large numbers of civilians, which is a good thing. It is what makes it easy for the US military to point to ISIS and say "those fighers are uncivilized they kill civilians". It is a significant advantage on the ground, because civilians are less hatefull towards the US as a result. It is also the right thing to do.

Edit: Abu Ghraib was horrible and the solders should have been sent to prison for the rest of their lives and not just a few years.

Also, I do not support the US military and think that they cause more harm than good in their foreign engagements.

<comment><USER2> Much of this is because we're nominally at peace with Syria. _ISIS_ is the belligerent party.

We absolutely did bomb large numbers of civilians in WW2, Iraq, and Vietnam, and in the latter two cases we hadn't even formally declared war.

<comment><USER42> Are you nitpicking the examples as stand-alone, or as part of the greater argument: that war does have ethics?

If you're intending to say that it doesn't, I think you should revisit your conclusion.

Otherwise, these were just examples of war having ethics.

<comment><USER2> My argument is that war has ethics as long as it is peacetime. As soon as it is wartime, the ethics are quickly forgotten. The ethics are remembered again once peace is restored, but only for the losing side.

I've got another comment that lays out some historical examples of this [1], but there are plenty more.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13897486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13897486)

(In particular, I'm not commenting on whether war _should_ have ethics; I agree that it should. But factually, looking at what belligerents actually do in wartime, _it doesn 't_, at least in any meaningful sense.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Bitcoin Can No Longer Work as a Virtual Currency - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/03/why-bitcoin-can-no-longer-work-as-a-virtual-currency-in-1-paragraph/359648/ <comment><USER3> All the Bitcoin tax advice I've ever read said to pay capital gains tax on it. That's what I've done in the past, like many other people. The recent news from the IRS just gives us more confidence that the mainstream interpretation was correct all along.

So I don't think the sky is falling. Nothing has fundamentally changed. "Bitcoin is like digital gold" remains a semi-decent analogy.

<comment><USER4> Bitcoin's value is based on market perception. Unfortunately the market may not have been as savvy as yourself. Just because you are and have been willing to treat bitcoins this way doesn't mean that the market is.

<comment><USER5> Correct. But when the 'market' realizes how Quantative Easing is making them exponentially poorer I guess they might just switch to gold again - <USER2> digital gold?.

<comment><USER6> Quantitative Easing is making me exponentially poorer? Inflation has not been a problem since QE has started, so how exactly am I poorer, nevermind 'exponentially' poorer?

<comment><USER7> If you put a dollar in a box in 1914 and took it out in 2014 it would be worth 2230.49% less (or, $23 today is one 1914 dollar).

If you have cash on hand, that money becomes worth less as quantitative easing expands the monetary base, among other inflationary factors.

If you spend that money (on investments, goods, etc) then you are putting your long term value in other things than your currency.

The distinction is that the austrian school wants a reliable money sink that grows more scarce and thus more valuable over time. The modern US dollar is anything _but_ a place to store value - instead, the monetary system heavily incentivizes you to get rid of your dollars as quickly as possible.

Which is fine, it means money doesn't rot in banks and fall out of circulation. You aren't at maximum velocity but you definitely have good momentum that way.

I think the real issue is blaming inflation for wage stagnation (which started around the same time the gold standard was dropped), when in reality it is just business exploitation of supply and demand that keeps wages down while all other goods and services prices rise somewhere in the ballpark of inflation.

I love bitcoin, and have a good chunk of my on hand cash stored in it for buying stuff or just having fun trying to play the price, and state currency manipulation does abuse their monopoly on legal counterfeiting to benefit a select few and hurt the rest of us, but it isn't an issue with having an inflating currency, I don't think.

It is why I like Doge in many ways. It is going to have constant inflation forever, so it is very predictable, and if it ever got market demand saturation it would only devalue over time so people would keep spending it. And bitcoin is a great peer to that, because we are only going to have a finite number of btc, and once the printing presses stop we will only see that money supply shrink from lost wallets and such, so they will only become more scarce over time.

<comment><USER8> The #1 mandate of the federal reserve is to keep inflation steady at around 3%. They've done a pretty good job of this (with the exception of the 1970s). But QE isn't about causing inflation; it's about stopping deflation. QE is designed to stave off deflation by intentionally expanding the money supply.

Basically, the money supply was artificially inflated by the housing bubble. Once the bubble burst, a lot of money disappeared over the course of 3 months or so. So the fed is using QE to prop up the money supply so the dollar doesn't rapidly appreciate in value. What we've learned from Japan's "lost decade" is that deflation can have even more harmful long-term consequences to an economy than inflation (suddenly it becomes MUCH more expensive to make goods in the US than the rest of the world, banks stop lending completely because money gains value with no risk, etc.) It starts a chain-reaction cycle that is really tough to break out of.

So the fed wasn't gutting the value of the dollar as much as they were preventing it from appreciating value quickly. As good of a thing as it sounds like it is, it's a bad idea to have money become more valuable just by holding on to it. Inflation creates an incentive to invest your money back into the economy, and while rampant inflation is almost always bad, a small amount of predictable inflation is a good thing if kept in check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The last couple paragraphs of this article are kind of ridiculous.

If the IRS decides that bitcoins are like stocks and bonds, the IRS will accept an average cost basis rather than the user having to account for each individual bitcoin (or fraction of a bitcoin).

If it works like inventory, then the taxpayer will have to decide between several accounting strategies (last-in-first-out or first-in-first-out for example) when deciding cost basis. It's complicated, but it's an order of magnitude easier than what the author is suggesting.

<comment><USER10> > _It 's complicated_

I also have to wonder what tax returns would look like, once automated tracking occurs. Thousands of transactions per year, netting out to very little money (if and when btc/ltc values stablize) will make even electronic returns quite sizeable.

I suspect that once the IRS realizes it has DoS'd itself, it will decide that the foreign currency exemption of $600 was there for good reason and revert to currency rules.

<comment><USER11> The IRS doesn't have to implement automated tracking though or read each and every return. It has considerable discretion in which returns it decides to audit, if any.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps it can't work as a currency in the United States sure, I always expected the USA to fudge up the acceptance of Bitcoin.

The world is a large place and Bitcoin is a very amazing, worldwide thing that I fully believe can continue to work as a currency, outside of the USA of course.

<comment><USER13> I agree. It seems to me that we're dealing something whose potential we don't yet fully understand. It might very well fail, but a declaration by the IRS changes nothing except the behavior of speculators.

If all Bitcoin is good for is a way to replace Visa/MC then there is nothing all that fundamentally different about it. Dwolla and/or others will take care of that.

It is clear that it will take time for the really interesting uses of Bitcoin to emerge (if it survives). Until then, it doesn't matter what anyone declares about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The author argument would probably not hold up under an IRS audit, and doesn't fully match up with how bitcoin works.

First, many bitcoin users "own" their bitcoins using a managed web wallet like Coinbase. In that case, you cannot trace the individuals coins on the blockchain. It is up to the tax payer to report their cost basis.

Moreover, it is not obvious from looking at the blockchain which transactions are use to buy goods (a taxable event, according to the IRS), and which transactions are used to transfer money to yourself (the equivalent of moving money from one pocket to another; not a taxable event).

Thus, the IRS ruling, while onerous, does not really affect the "fungibility" of bitcoin.

<comment><USER8> Since most users store their money in wallets with exchanges like Coinbase, how trivial would it be to write trading algorithms that minimize shifts in capital gains? E.g. Coinbase would try to balance capital losses and gains on a continuous basis, then come tax time they sell off an appropriate number of BTC to pay the tax bill on the net appreciation of their coins over that time.

I think this will accelerate the shift towards Bitcoin exchanges operating as banks under the law. If you, as a consumer, deposit $1000 with Coinbase, they could store this as $1000 USD if they were a bank. Then, upon you actually wanting to spend the Bitcoin, they perform the transaction to another bank. It all happens so fast that the price of BTC doesn't change so the consumer pays no capital gains taxes.

Likewise, if you choose to maintain your BTC wallet yourself, TurboTax could write a module where you provide them your wallet address and they let you know your tax burden by comparing your transactions over the last year with the spot price of BTC when they were performed. It's not obvious from looking at the blockchain, but if you have the blockchain plus the addresses of all the various wallets owned by a person, you could do it. Transactions within that set of wallets are non-taxable, transactions outside of it are. If you don't provide all your wallet addresses, that's effectively tax fraud and is no different than keeping a Swiss bank account. At the end of the day, the government has the power to throw you in jail if you don't pay your taxes, and that gives them the power to regulate the economy.

This is all predicated on the assumption that Bitcoin will never serve as a true currency; which I think all signs are that it won't because governments just aren't willing to give up enough control over the economy to make it possible. But Bitcoin can still be useful as a method of transaction, which is why I think we're seeing regulation pop up around it.

<comment><USER15> If Coinbase is holding dollars because bitcoin have scary tax implications, why is the receiving party going to want bitcoin (instead of dollars)?

It's sort of an obnoxious way to put it, but you are essentially saying that it will be like payments today, except with some bitcoin sprinkled on it to make it exciting or cheaper or something.

(I do understand that bitcoin might enable international transactions where some sort of technological escrow takes the place of contracts and trust, I just haven't seen any real compelling explanations as to why the technological escrow will end up cheaper.)

<comment><USER8> I don't think Bitcoin really have scary tax implications if you're an exchange -- you're moving Bitcoin in and out of your wallets so often you can just choose the most advantageous coins. An exchange is necessarily going to have better record keeping than an individual because the executives of the exchange can go to jail if things go wrong and proper safeguards weren't in place.

This is really no different than how most commercial banks work -- your balance is used to buy stocks, bonds and financial derivatives (obviously subject to certain portfolio risk management requirements). It used to be illegal to do this with non-government securities (aka bonds) until Glass- Steagall was repealed, but now everyone does it. They trade these securities on a regular basis, and then at the end of the quarter they book capital gains and losses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's an interesting argument, and fungibility is a critically-important feature of Bitcoin.

However, I don't think this is at all an unexpected move by the IRS. Most of us were expecting this all along, and calculating our taxes accordingly.

Now, if the U.S. were smart and forward-looking we'd adopt the same policy as Denmark and Germany (Bitcoins aren't taxed). But we're not, and so we didn't.

</comment><comment><USER17> How are changes in the value of "traditional", state-backed currency taxed? If I, say, bought 1 Euro for $0.80 in 2000, and sold it for $1.60 in 2008 (prices from [https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/exchange/eurofxref/html/euro...](https://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/exchange/eurofxref/html/eurofxref- graph-usd.en.html)), am I taxed on the difference?

Or do currency speculators and day-traders get off tax-free? That seems odd.

<comment><USER18> [http://www.fxop.com/Forex%20Taxation.html](http://www.fxop.com/Forex%20Taxation.html)

That makes my head hurt, but it sounds like if you hold actual currency and realize gains, those gains are treated as ordinary income (top rate 39.6%), but if you instead trade in qualified currency futures contracts, gains are taxed according to a split formula which pulls the top rate closer to the long term cap gains rate of 15%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "To tax Bitcoin as property, he says, destroys its fungibility: One Bitcoin can no longer be exchanged for another."

I think that is false. From what I understand you only get taxed when you realize the value of bitcoin, such as purchasing something with it.

</comment><comment><USER20> If I have a bitcoin in a wallet publicly known as "mine" it still would not count as a valid proof that someone can tax me on it.

(I'm not American, it's a thought experiment.)

How does one prove the ownership of the wallet? If they just assume it's mine because I once claimed so in public, would they also protect me from btc- related theft, fraud and whatever else property related crimes, either on gederal or state level, just because I claimed the crime had taken place? And if no, what rights exactly do they claim to protect in exchange for taxes collected from this ephemeral "property"?

This is ridiculous. Governments hate the fact that people can finally challenge government monopoly on money, and are afraid of losing control, as well as means to get rich at expense of other citizens. [1] I hope people will be reasonable and don't pay any taxes, at least because they gain nothing in return.

Again, a proper human rights campaign, with lawyers and cryptocurrency experts working together, and a good targeted media coverage, could end all this until it's too late. If we don't fight for our rights in today's rapidly changing world we shall lose everything. All the great technologies will effectively work against us.

[1] [http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-austrian- influence...](http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/the-austrian-influences- on-bitcoin)

<comment><USER21> It's an honor system, the same as for other non-tracked property. You sell bitcoin, you pay capital gains taxes to pay for gov't infrastructure and services provided to you (the things they give in exchange for taxes). You get robbed of your bitcoin, if the gov't has no reason to suspect otherwise they trust you when you claim a capital loss to pay less tax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Doesn't all of this also apply to Gold? If you bought gold at $400 and then later again at $1000, then you could apply the same non-fungibility argument against it.

And yet, currency used to be redeemable into gold. Was it then not a real currency? Didn't the non-fungibility of gold also infect the currencies it backed, thereby making them non-fungible as well?

EDIT: of course gold backed currencies were fungible. In the same way, bitcoin is its own backed currency. And hence, also fungible. QED ;)

<comment><USER23> I don't think so, because when we were on the gold standard, the price of gold - or the exchange rate in US dollars (?) - was fixed.

<comment><USER24> I may be interpreting the term fungible incorrectly. At a given point in time, won't one Bitcoin always be exchangeable for another Bitcoin?

If I purchased a BC for $1 and the current market price is $1.50, my basis is $1 and my unrealized gain is $.50, but does that gain impact something being fungible? The coin is still mutually interchangeable at that point.

I keep reading examples of trading a baseball card. If I had two Babe Ruth cards, one in perfect condition and one with bent edges, the items aren't valued the same and most likely won't be directly traded for one another. They aren't fungible.

<comment><USER23> Yes I think you're right, which is why I think the IRS ruling is 'wrong' from the perspective of people who want bitcoin to be legal tender. I think the IRS ruling is entirely 'right' from the perspective of people who don't want to criminalize bitcoin, but have an interest in preventing its use as currency. Like the US Government and the banking industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't know... personally I don't even expect Bitcoin to be a good "medium of value" or "commonly desired medium of exchange" in an economic sense. The main raison d'etre for bitcoin for me is, should I some day have the desire to do so, to buy drugs and other things deemed illegal, anonymously. (Since I don't buy such things, I don't use bitcoin at the moment.) For this purpose, bitcoins only have to hold their value for a miniscule amount of time, from the time I buy them to the time I've transferred them (and to the time the reciever of the bitcoins has done something with them). It is theoretically even possible to reduce this time to milliseconds. (I'd buy bitcoins in person or via wire transfer, they'd get passed through a tumbler, do the transaction I'm interested in, and my transaction gets matched with other bitcoin<->money transactions somewhere else on the planet. Most individuals would only hold the coins for split-seconds.) Basically, I view it as a kind of digital Hawala [1]. For this purpose, the current value stability is much better than needed.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala)

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't get all the fuss. Bitcoin is being treated as any other currency. If I make a profit buying and selling Euros I also have to pay capital gains tax. What am I missing here?

</comment><comment><USER27> You still don't have to pay capital gains if you purchase something with Bitcoins (rather than converting it to USD first). You do however have to pay the tax on the item.

<comment><USER28> Not true.

Q-6: Does a taxpayer have gain or loss upon an exchange of virtual currency for other property?

A-6: Yes. If the fair market value of property received in exchange for virtual currency exceeds the taxpayer's adjusted basis of the virtual currency, the taxpayer has taxable gain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> What happens when people start pricing things only in cryptocurrency, and there is no dollar value attached to the transaction? This is fairly rare in the Bitcoin world, where many places sell via payment gateway that immediately converts back to $USD, but is common in the Dogecoin world, where many of the goods exchanged are intangibles (tipping, donations) or one-off items (see r/dogemarket for examples; there are a lot of handmade goods or services).

</comment><comment><USER30> How can this apply to exchanging BTC for services? If I exchange 1 BTC for 1 year of service, and that company exchanges 100 BTC for 1 year of work by an employee... how does the tax get collected?

</comment><comment><USER31> This seems like a theoretical argument. From a practical point of view, isn't there just enough anonymity that people won't report it?

<comment><USER6> Maybe for transactions between individuals. However, a business couldn't last very long by 'just not reporting it'. This means that very few businesses will accept a bitcoin as payment, and its usefulness will be limited.

<comment><USER16> Yes, but few Bitcoin businesses are holding coins for more than a few seconds, or days at most. So the taxation issues will be minimal (and probably Bitpay and similar services will calculate any minimal taxes due automatically).

<comment><USER6> Converting bit coins to dollars means that there will be fees.. which makes bitcoins no better for a merchant than credit cards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yes. And according to the laws of physics, a bumblebee can't fly. It's just - the bumblebee doesn't know that.

<comment><USER4> wat?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So if I sell at a loss, I get a tax break?

</comment><comment><USER34> what happens tax-wise if I buy $100 of Euros and in a month I sell them at $150?

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure, as with Bitcoins, you would pay tax on $50:

see [http://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/09/forex- taxation...](http://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/09/forex-taxation- basics.asp)

<comment><USER34> So then I don't understand the point this article is trying to make, wouldn't this would reinforce the idea that bitcoin is like a currency (a foreign one for ex)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> George and I trade Pokemon cards a lot. Daddy says I can't play with Pokemon cards anymore. That means I can't hang out with George.

Also, there are other countries besides the IRS one (with an order of magnitude more people).

This article is pure trash and you should kill yourself if you agree with it.

<comment><USER36> For a moment I almost felt like you were advocating violence in response to feeling your belief system being threatened.</comment></comment>


2011 Inc 5000: The fastest growing private companies - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/inc5000/search/2011/x/x/x/x/x/x/

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're looking to begin a startup but not quite sure where to focus you energies, the Inc 5000 list is invaluable. It shows at a high level the sectors and companies that are gaining the most traction. These are the companies you want to be your competitors.</comment>


Look what we built in 30 days. - <AUTHOR> http://www.dashzen.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Example public dashboards that some users have made so far:

5by5 podcasts: <https://www.dashzen.com/p/Q/n9jot> Latest in Paleo: <https://www.dashzen.com/p/Q/0Yia6> Tech Companies' Facebook Likes: <https://www.dashzen.com/p/Q/8zPx1> Tech News: <https://www.dashzen.com/p/Q/LBQVi> Presidential Election Polls: <https://www.dashzen.com/p/D/WIYyX> The Hobbit Movie: <https://www.dashzen.com/p/F/iud6H></comment>


A halloween tale regarding JavaScript on OS X - <AUTHOR> http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?pid=176515#p176515

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an insightful thread on Macscripter.net, about how bad the javascript implementation on OS X really is.

The dev team has even been provided with a reference implementation that does stuff the right way, but no . . .</comment>


Last.fm founders quit - <AUTHOR> http://blog.last.fm/2009/06/10/message-from-the-lastfm-founders-felix-rj-and-martin

<comment><USER3> I don't think there should be undue stigma or speculation when founders move on. The type of person who can cast a vision that brings a company to this point isn't always (or rarely is) the same person who will thrive on the task of maintaining a company once it reaches, or nearly reaches the founder's original vision for it. There is nothing wrong with finding the most opportune moment to bow out, provided you aren't screwing over anyone else.

<comment><USER4> There's clear evidence that a leader that founded the company with a clear guiding vision is irreplaceable. The large companies that have survived for 15+ years; Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon come to mind; are those that are most successful even upon maturity.

<comment><USER3> You are probably pretty much correct, but at the same time if it was that cut- and-dried then the contracts would stipulate tenure a lot longer than 2 years for founders when a startup gets bought out.

<comment><USER4> Notice that the examples I gave aren't companies that have been bought out; they're still being led by their founders. The problem is that less and less companies are having IPOs and reaching massive size to carry out their original vision properly. Instead, their liquidation option is acquisition, which keeps the CEOs of big, rich companies in power and lets them carry out the visions of acquirees the way they see fit -- which usually isn't the optimal solution.

A founder is much more suited to carry out his or her vision by having millions of dollars in the bank and no constraints, rather than be constrained by the acquiring company in a system that is bloated and become increasingly bureaucratic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if they are essentially saying "since our stock is finished vesting over the last 2 years..."

They might have wanted to leave for some time.

edit: It's really close to the exact 2 year mark <http://www.crunchbase.com/company/last-fm>

<comment><USER6> Didn't pg just say that being in a startup is like being repeatedly punched in the face, but being in a big company is like being waterboarded?

<comment><USER5> I think that was in the context of leaving a big company to start a startup.

Joining a big company after your startup is acquired is a bit different dynamic. Maybe it can be likened to opium. I've never tried opium, nor sold a company.

But it must feel good, with obviously bad and brewing side effects.

<comment><USER6> At least from the Inc article it was in context of working at Yahoo after getting bought.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am not normally a conspiracy theorist, but the first thing that crossed my mind was the whole crappy drama with techcrunch.

Have the founders discovered that there was a data leak - and, given their opinions on the matter - decided it better to quit than work with whoever made it happen?

I hope not (edit: because I was rooting for last.fm, not because I want it to be true).

<comment><USER8> all 3 founders leave at the same time, only two years after being acquired? there is more to this than simply leaving to do other things. founders of sites like last.fm don't just let their babies go so easily, acquisition or not (think myspace, facebook, bebo, etc.)

I would say that it is connected to the RIAA drama and CBS sending them user info. If they resigned because of that, then full props to them (they just owe TC one big apology).

If the data sharing with the RIAA did happen and they didn't resign - <USER2> shame on them.

<comment><USER7> I don't think all 3 leaving at the same time means anything. One would assume that they're probably great friends, and feel that their combined effort in a new project (when the time comes) is better than 1 or 2 going separate ways.

That's how I see it, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 2 years...about the right time for bonus, retention payments, options, etc. to vest.

</comment><comment><USER10> Well, if they all left at the same time, I really hope they are working on something new. It's interesting that Felix, RJ and Martin were actually the original team (I thought at first that they were just part of the original team): <http://www.last.fm/about/team> so I'm looking forward to see a new startup from them.

</comment><comment><USER11> 7 years is a long time to have spent working on a single company.

<comment><USER4> That's why you should start something that you really believe in. :) Start-ups aren't a get-rich-quick scheme -- it just happens that the market desperately needs some product or good that leads a select few company to explosive growth, which the media then focuses on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 2 years seems a good average length to endure big-corp life. Wonder if there's some more data on this somewhere.

<comment><USER13> Would be nearly impossible to analyze because so much is dependent on (private) vesting terms

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> As a founder when (if ever) do you pass over control of a business you started?

That's a hard question to answer. Obviously it depends on what your goals were initially (build something, make some cash) and whether or not you've met them.

After building and selling a business what do you do next? Build another business and sell it? Or perhaps build a business, and keep on building it for the rest of your working days? Is that what twitter is up to? EV sold blogger a while back.

</comment><comment><USER15> the reason i would read more into this than just 'it's time to move on' is when all 3 founders leave at the same time. or is that more common than i would suspect?

</comment><comment><USER16> In an open world, <http://libre.fm> shows promise.

<comment><USER16> guys? what did I say? Was this so off-topic? I was only suggesting an alternative...

<comment><AUTHOR> It's getting a bit trite that every time Last.fm is mentioned (in good or bad light) that someone mentions libre.fm.

Don't get me wrong, it's a nice project, but it's as annoying as constantly plugging your startups alternative to a popular service, the fact it's open- source doesn't dull that.

<comment><USER16> thanks! I didn't know libre.fm was so well-known around here.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to beat AVG's fake traffic spew - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/02/linkscanner_fake_traffic_temporary_fix/ <comment><USER2> Is this really as an important issue as The Register is making it out to be? So the user fetches your page without looking at it. That's how the web works. Bandwidth, at least with my host, is nearly free... so who cares. Your ads and javascript-based analytics aren't being hit, so it shouldn't be affecting your monetarily. And even if it is, this is how the web works. Clients can do whatever they want. They can scan your page for malware, they can not display it, or they can download it over and over for no reason.

<comment><USER3> I agree. At most I think it could be argued that what AVG does is impolite client behavior. Do enough people even use this product that it's is a problem to begin with? This isn't much different than all those web accelerators that were popular a few years ago and I don't remember anyone griping about those taking up bandwidth. This whole thing seems like a non-issue.

I also wonder if the people talking about filtering or redirecting this AVG traffic are some of the same people clamoring for net neutrality. Granted, this is a little different because we're not talking about filtering at the ISP level, but keep in mind this effectively degrades the quality of a product that someone has paid for. If this was being done by Comcast or Time Warner we'd be raising bloody hell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I use the web server hits to let me know what people are interested in. I don't burden my users with javascript analytics.

For the moment I can just drop all the data from IE6 users, but if AVG is serious about this they will have to start randomizing their signature or it won't work.

AVG is a robot. They should use the robot exclusion protocol and clearly identify themselves in their user agent string.

<comment><USER3> My understanding is that the whole point of this feature is to identify bad sites. It defeats the whole purpose of the feature if it identifies itself as a robot and site owners can easily filter or redirect the traffic.

<comment><USER4> It depends on the site. A non-malevolent site that has malware injected into its HTML will still be caught. The content won't get a chance to see the identification.

A malevolent site can just track their mechanism and work around it, like not showing malware to IE6 users unless they ask for the content a second time in quick succession. (Might not work, I don't know if the AVG copy gets cached. One would hope it doesn't for the sake of sites that do browser sniffing.)</comment></comment></comment>


Economic Growth Is the Answer - <AUTHOR> https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/growth-technology-living-standards-by-michael-boskin-2019-12 <comment><USER2> rich white guy who is exxon movile executive says please don't stop him and his friends from ruining everbody's lives by hoarding wealth.</comment>


Ooshmma Garg's startup: gobble.com - SF Bay Area - <AUTHOR> http://www.gobble.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Home cooked food: order over the net for pickup or delivery. I sampled some of their food at the California Street Farmers Market today (5/22) and it was very good. They launched today and have an awesome special for the first 100 people to order.

</comment><comment><USER2> i use delivery.com a few times a week so this concept isn't new to me. gooble has nicer food but the offerings for SF proper are limited at the moment. having a gourmet meal delivered to my doorstep is appealing.</comment>


IBM no longer offers general purpose facial recognition or analysis software - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/08/ibm-ends-all-facial-recognition-work-as-ceo-calls-out-bias-and-inequality/ <comment><USER2> The rumour of IBM dropping "all facial recognition work" is unsubstantiated, despite making its way into industry's headlines.

Krishna's letter is here[0]. IBM will cease to sell related products and services. One might speculate they might resume sales once there are strong regulations and limitations in place.

[0] [https://www.ibm.com/blogs/policy/wp- content/uploads/2020/06/...](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/policy/wp- content/uploads/2020/06/Letter-from-IBM.pdf)

<comment> saint-loup Quoting from your link:

>>> IBM no longer offers general purpose IBM facial recognition or analysis software. IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency. We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.

Even if the phrasing is limited to "general purpose" and "software", it still seems a pretty strong stance to me.

<comment><USER3> I tend to start liking them more and more. Power as only unbackdoored modern CPU, and now this. Seems to be a big marketing push, in the right direction.

<comment><USER4> > Power as only unbackdoored modern CPU

Can you provide more details/proof?

<comment><USER5> I think they are referring to it not having Intel ME or TrustZone (which is present in AMD chips and ARM chips), which could allow the processor manufacturer to run code that you don't know about. Of course, there's no Power systems for consumer use, so we're kind of stuck with Intel/AMD (until Apple releases those ARM Macs, which probably can't boot linux :( ).

<comment><USER6> Raptor Computing Systems makes the Talos II and Blackbird, both with POWER9 CPUs and available for purchase by consumers today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are a number of cynical comments here about how they weren't making money on the technology and are just announcing this for PR reasons. Well, maybe, but isn't that sort of cynical response even worse?

I'm rabidly against the use of facial recognition on unwilling subjects, whether it's a government actor (by far the most oppressive use) or a corporate actor. I'm rabidly against public space cameras. I want to see this technology die and never return.

We all love to pounce on companies for doing things we don't like. Why don't we celebrate this as the victory it is? Of _course_ there's a PR component here. Why wouldn't they make an announcement? Why wouldn't they do it now when the audience might be more receptive to the idea? The fact that they weren't making money off it is unlikely to be the only reason they're canceling it. IBM plays the long game, and there's absolutely a market for this technology. A huge and profitable market. They could have kept at it and turned a profit.

So, yeah, they're trying to make some hay, but not every corporate action is purely cynical and evil. Let's appreciate that they've made a positive change, and let's hope that it increases awareness of a horrible technology, and puts pressure on the more egregious actors like Amazon and the defense industry. We don't have to pat IBM on the back, but we can cut them some slack.

<comment><USER8> It's just software, if an actor wanted to use facial recognition they can write it themselves. Isn't the correct attack vector regulation vs having a company pull its products? If IBM isn't doing it someone else will and it'll just be less competition, meaning a better funded product for the industry winner.

<comment><USER7> The primary customers for this technology are governments. They want it. They're not going to regulate it away from themselves. At best they'll regulate the far less dangerous civil use so as to pay lip service to concerns and amplify their "think of the children" misdirection. They can't write it as quickly or as effectively themselves. Governments don't write software. They pay IBM, Amazon, and Lockheed to do it. If most vendors grow a conscience (or fear consumer retribution), then no one writes it. Or it becomes prohibitively expensive. Or it doesn't work as well (which isn't necessarily always good, but is in this case, because it will reduce public support).

<comment><USER3> All governments already are using the best in class, from a German company, Cognitec. Not much chances for Northrop or IBM to make an impact there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reads like "we're behind, not catching up, not making money, and really need an excuse to drop this" to me, but I might just be too cynical.

<comment><USER10> I will say that 3 years ago when we tested all the major vendors' image recognition technology, they all failed spectacularly. And this wasn't some small project, we ran tens of thousands of our images through (out of over a million) and worked with several Phd students in our efforts.

A picture with a white college kid in the frame would get the output of "human". Put an African borrower in the frame and you got at best a failure to recognize a human, and at worst a reference to an animal.

I would hope the situation is much better now, but the bias (and just sheer inaccuracy) of the tools was readily apparent and we gave up on image recognition for the time being.

<comment><USER11> There are real technical challenges here. Lighter skin has more contrast between light and dark.

<comment><USER12> White people also have higher facial variance in general. I vaguely remember in university we had an assignment to generate "eigenfaces" or something and if you partitioned the faces by race the output of the SVD would be much wider for white people. This isn't especially surprising when you consider the fact that white people have more light/dark contrast, more hair colors, more eye colors, etc. I think a lot of the "bias" complaints levied against algorithms like this are not bias at all, but just humans who are unhappy the world doesn't quite live up to their idealized model.

<comment><USER13> When you sample from a smaller pool you will make uninformed statements like this. Black/Dark people of the world are not limited to Black people in Atlanta. Bet many people here do not know that there are Black people in this world, some who have naturally blonde hair and some who have blue eyes, google it.

Moreover capturing Black/Dark skin and features requires more accurate light metering & lighting because dark skin absorb more light. There's a lot variance in cheekbones, nose and lips.

Humans' features in general, are more complicated then you realize.

<comment><USER14> Ok but that can still be true (blonde hair, blue eyes) while there still being much more variations in the white population than in the black population.

I'm curious how many white people there are on earth vs how many black people there are, and other races. A couple google searches didn't give me any easy finds

<comment><USER15> That's because "white" and "black" are loose, shifting, ideological constructions with little basis in the scientific reality of human genetic variation. Many "white people" weren't considered "white" until fairly recently and Africa actually has more human genetic variation than anywhere else.

<comment><USER12> > little basis in the scientific reality of human genetic variation

This meme dates back to a loose claim made by R. Lewontin back in the 70s. In fact, you can very precisely and reliably recreate the "intuitive" human racial categorization using unsupervised algorithms, like doing multi- dimensional clustering over fixation indices. (It does not work using single- dimensional clustering, which is what Lewontin was talking about.)

Modern biologists usually talk in terms of clines rather than races, but this is just using the first derivative instead of the zeroth - you'll get the same result either way.

> Africa actually has more human genetic variation than anywhere else.

SNP diversity has ~nothing to do with phenotypic variance.

<comment><USER15> Of course the question here is recreate whose "intuitive racial categorization" because all of that is historically and culturally specific. Saying it's possible for a computer to recreate these categorizations presumes that the categorization has some objective reality outside of this when they're just a variable heuristic determined by all those inputs.

<comment><USER12> > all of that is historically and culturally specific

Not really - almost everyone can agree on "middle eastern/north african", "east asian", "south asian", "black african", "white", etc. If you force people to pick a single-digit number of major categories, they're probably going to come up with the same categories that k-means in fixation space would.

<comment><USER15> This is an evidence-free supposition, consistent with your pattern across this thread of making broad claims without anything to support them. You've provided no proof that k-means on a representative sample of phenotypic variation in the groups you cite would return this result.

That almost everyone can agree on these categories is also contrary to reality. For example, many of who you describe as East Asians consider themselves racially distinct both within their societies and from their nearby neighbors. Also, what major categories do mixed race people fall inside?

<comment><USER12> It's not my job to provide detailed proof on every HN post I make; I'm just pointing out something relevant, and if it interests you, you can go ahead and find where people have already done this. I think I've been specific enough that you can find this stuff on your own. This took me about 1 minute to find: [https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/to-classify- humanity...](https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/to-classify-humanity-is- not-that-hard)

> many of who you describe as East Asians consider themselves racially > distinct

That's why I specifically mentioned the _number_ of racial categories involved. Obviously as the number increases you can have different clustering results.

> Also, what major categories do mixed race people fall inside?

Obviously not into any of them, if we're talking about a simple mechanical classifier with high separation.

<comment><USER15> The number of racial categories would itself be an arbitrary limit not corresponding to actual genetic variance, nor would classification under such limit capture said variance, and none of it would match up to the folk biology of racial categorization. This is the general problem with reasoning backwards from 19th century gobbledygook about human genetic variation instead of beginning with the genetics themselves.

It may not be "your job" to provide such evidence, but you've made a series of specific claims about things like the rate of phenotypic variance among different racial groups. If you don't want to defend them, that's your prerogative, but you also can't expect them to be received as authoritative or remain free of challenge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This headline reminded me of the "Chicago PD" recent episode called "False Positive" (S7E6) [1]. A new id system is pushed into a resonant case by a police chief. The system's merits are touted as being 'strongly condemned by ACLU'. Yet still in beta..., people are shown on screen as just a collection of dots. Virtual code lines that affect real lives.

[1]: [https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10691948/](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt10691948/)

<comment><USER17> Somewhat related, there was a recent frontline documentary that delved into this: [https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5000](https://youtu.be/RVVfJVj5z8s?t=5000)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > a product that is similarly just barely good enough to use.

I thought facial recognition was advanced (mainly based on genpop articles), but isn't China using it massively with success?

<comment><USER19> _isn 't China using it massively_

Yes

 _with success?_

There's no way to know.

<comment><USER20> Based on a month in China, and having relatives there, I'd say very much yes to the second question.

If they want, they can trace your whole day from start to end in a city.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> P-NP A striking difference to what's happening in China where facial recognition software made SenseTime the world's most valuable AI unicorn: "However, facial recognition does not seem to have been making the company much money, if any. To be fair the technology is really in its infancy and there are few applications where an enterprise vendor like IBM makes sense."

<comment><USER21> I guess China has some money-worth applications for face recognition which luckily there isn't demand for in Western countries

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think the cat is out of the bag. There's enough public datasets and published methodologies that are relatively simple to implement, that quite usable facial recognition software is within the bounds of an undergraduate homework project. Sure, IBM can probably make it more accurate, but nonetheless, if somebody wants to make a tool that does e.g. ethnic profiling, then they can do it without the help of IBM, the techniques for solving similar vision tasks are known and people who can do it are widespread.

<comment><USER23> The relevant difference between IBM and the undergrad is that the latter will have a hard time pitching to governments.

<comment><USER22> Any interested government department where a manager wants this can hire a random graduate that can implement this for them, it could be literally be a one-man project with a trivial budget. There's no multimillion purchase pitch required, a regional niche department can do it in their own kitchen without involving the rest of the government using spare change they have to spend until the end of the fiscal year in order to not get the next year's budget reduced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I understand how ml can replicate existing cultural bias in recommendation systems or risk scoring systems, but how does bias work in the context of facial recognition?

<comment><USER25> technically much lower accuracy on African-American and Asian populations (in the US)[1]. More importantly technical issues aside the primary use case of facial recognition seems to be the policing of minority or vulnerable populatoins and erosion of privacy more broadly, which tends to hit minorities the worst.

[1][https://www.wsj.com/articles/facial-recognition-software- suf...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/facial-recognition-software-suffers-from- racial-bias-u-s-study-finds-11576807304)

<comment><USER26> But isn't the bias mostly just because of the lack of data? Asian facial recognition works very well (or very badly, depending on your perspective) in China...where there is a ton of data on Asian facial structures, etc, for example.

<comment><USER27> It's not just a problem of lack of data, it's a problem of composition of data. If there's a signal that increases your accuracy for asian faces and decreases it for caucasian faces, in systems deployed in China the system weights will be adjusted one way, in systems deployed in Europe you'll get the other way, _and_ Asians in Europe and Caucasians in China will get bad performance. Maybe people don't care about that, but wait until that performance difference is between black and white people in America.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Quote: "However, facial recognition does not seem to have been making the company much money, if any."

Right there it's the real reason why. Rest of IBM's blah blah is just dust in eyes.

<comment><USER29> Never let a crisis go to waste. Why just cancel a program that's losing money when you can cancel the program and tell everyone it's because of your new found belief in social justice.

<comment><USER30> "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste." \- Paul Romer

I dust this quote off far too often for my liking, but it fits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Honestly if I were a POC the last thing I would want is accurate facial recognition.

FaceID will work regardless thanks to depth maps.

I can't see any other use of the technology benefiting me.

</comment><comment><USER32> What is he referring to when he mentions "racial profiling" in the context of facial recognition? Is it just a disparity in training data?

<comment><USER33> Hasn't there been a bunch of goof ups with it having trouble with black faces?

[https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle- recogni...](https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize- black-faces-equally/)

Google Photos tagged blacks as gorillas: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/mzhang/2015/07/01/google- photos...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/mzhang/2015/07/01/google-photos-tags- two-african-americans-as-gorillas-through-facial-recognition- software/#3c90a334713d)

3 years later they still hadn't solved it: [https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist- go...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/12/16882408/google-racist-gorillas- photo-recognition-algorithm-ai)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Issue real. But with one not so successful vendor out, what does it meant?

Also, with china here and like many technology could you not do it china would give up as well? Is it 2016 when the coronavirus study join with a us u stop due to concerns but not by china (Wuhan lab) that give them a lead? Or human genetic HIV research on baby?

No good solution but I think just quit is not the one for a potential human rights related technology research or area?

</comment><comment><USER35> Only AFTER they helped China develop the technology to racially ID their Muslims. And IBM isn't alone, many companies have helped China to efficiently fill its death camps.

<comment><USER36> Do you have any sources on that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> IBM failed to compete.

</comment><comment><USER38> Give IBM a break. It isn't as if it would have had some experience in the past suggesting that its technology could be used for monstrous ends.

</comment><comment><USER34> This might be a strange argument but look at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23459963)

The key is to have open data and not let Chinese to have world data whilst they close their it and data for themselves. Shut down an area and let china lead is not the human right answer. You need to force them to join the world in a meaningful way. We cannot study photos or things like that like study Soviet Union politics.

Just too danger to leave and let china to win. All in and ensure the technology be used in an open And censurable manner.

</comment><comment><USER39> They're just behind. And the ACLU "bias" study was thin and unscientific. Data sets and weights could have bias, but that bias can also be controlled. "Facial recognition" does not have bias.</comment>


Show HN: Appventa - Beautiful shopping app builder - <AUTHOR> http://appventa.com <comment><USER2> Does this count as a showhn?

<comment><AUTHOR> hey ismail, thanks for the signup.

yeah i've seen the Show HN email signup rules. Believe me i would love to open up the platform now despite being beta and all. But given that an iOS app is involved (needs a testflight acct), i have to settle for an email signup.. for now.</comment></comment>


Myth of the genius solitary scientist is dangerous - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/myth-of-the-genius-solitary-scientist-is-dangerous-87835 <comment><USER2> A typical pattern with genius though is an incredible amount of time spent alone (usually before age 30). Later in life you need to open yourself up and communicate regularly, but this is more an extra bonus than the core of innovation.

Check out the 1962 book "Cradles of Eminence"

Cradles of Eminence: Childhoods of More Than 700 Famous Men and Women [https://www.amazon.com/dp/091070757X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Bpig...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/091070757X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_BpigAbA5Y5H80)</comment>


Simple Performance Optimizations on Grofers.com with React, Webpack, HTTP/2 - <AUTHOR> https://lambda.grofers.com/2017/01/13/making-grocery-shopping-faster-on-web/ <comment><USER2> I think brotli can be used. Global usage is 55% according to [http://caniuse.com/#search=brotli](http://caniuse.com/#search=brotli)

<comment><AUTHOR> When we started out, we were short on time and thought of using either whichever covers most of our target user base. Zopfli works everywhere whereas Brotli is not supported everywhere. Also, Nginx does not support Brotli out of the box and had to be compiled. Since there were some complexities as well, we went ahead with Zopfli only.

Now that we have more time, we have the luxury to setup infrastructure for serving both Zopfli and Brotli. Perhaps one of the next steps for us to make our website even faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> 1)Where do you make your api calls in componentDidMount or componentWillMount ?

2)Are you using Redux to manage all of your state? Is it getting too verbose?

<comment><USER4> componentDidMount is the right place to call for an API. if you are interested in server-side rendering would recommend this post [https://blog.tableflip.io/server-side-rendering-with- react-a...](https://blog.tableflip.io/server-side-rendering-with-react-and- redux/)

yes we use redux and strongly follows its design pattern.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that link.

Have you guys looked into MobX?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Might want to make use of CSS sprites.</comment>