Shahid is awesome, I would vote for him if I lived in SF.
Readit Newsisho commented on Reddit AMA with Shahid Buttar, on Leave from EFF and Running for Congress in SF reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco... · Posted by u/jdp23
IMO, Twitter is the poster child for the tech bubble. They have users, which is their only claim to viability, but notably, they have never made a profit. Currently valued at around $10 billion with 350 million active users, that's about $29 per user. You'd be hard-pressed to find an investor so foolish that they would invest $29 in each of their users and hope to make it back if it were stated in those terms, but people have rushed to invest in a company which only has users, and whose attempts to monetize users through advertising have correlated strongly with loss of users. There can be little argument that Twitter's price has become entirely detached from its value.
That doesn't of course, mean you couldn't make money by investing in Twitter. You can make money by investing in overvalued companies as long as you don't hold onto your share until it busts. One profitable route would be if Twitter does get bought by a larger company. The market as a whole will lose on Twitter, but local maxima can be more profitable than the whole.
But at a personal level, don't be naive about this. A lot of people are investing, not just money, but time and energy, in Twitter or startups like Twitter. If you find yourself thinking that Twitter is a company with any real value, you should take a step back and evaluate whether you're being wise, or whether you've fallen prey to the unbridled optimism of the tech bubble. Twitter's position as poster child for the tech bubble makes it a good litmus test for people's understanding of the industry, and I suspect it will correlate very strongly with who loses everything when the tech bubble collapses.
$29 per user doesn't seem that out of line from other companies I've worked for. Of course it totally depends on the business but it comes down to the expected revenue each of those users will generate.
isho commented on BitFinex down due to Bitcoin security breach - 120k BTC stolen reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarke... · Posted by u/STRML
Somebody, one of these days, should design a cryptocurrency whose point is just to NOT get stolen.
Bitcoin's security model is fundamentally different from more traditional money transfer system. Security is distributed pushing responsibility to the edges. Individual users must secure their own keys but only those funds are at risk if those keys are compromised.
By forcing Bitcoin into a central clearing house model like most of these exchanges are doing you arguably have the worst security properties of both models.
isho commented on Supreme Court: Raisin board unconstitutional latimes.com/business/la-f... · Posted by u/beefman
It's hard not to sympathize with the folks who have been saying all along that Sotomayor is an extremist, in light of her views in this case, which was an 8-1 decision.
What is extremist about voting in favor of the status quo?
But more importantly, what's wrong with a justice being the lone decenter? Don't we want justices who vote on the merits of the case alone? What's the value in having nine justices who all think a like and vote the same way? I think our supreme court should reflect the values and priorities of all americans.
Seems to me like you just don't like Sotomayor. Which is fine, you are entitled to your opinion, but why don't you come up with criticisms more constructive than calling her "extremist," because you are basically just encouraging group think.
isho commented on The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science quadrant.org.au/magazine/... · Posted by u/denzil_correa
The worse problem these days is knowing what articles or even research to believe, because it is so damn easy to write anything on the internet that recognizing BS or truth is becoming almost impossible. When the web appeared many of us thought that truth would be easier to see, but in reality it just meant that the noise was more easily generated.
Recognizing BS from truth has always been difficult. The only way I know of is to take the time to think for your self and come up with your own opinions, get information from different sources and contemplate the arguments from both sides before forming your own opinions.
Personally the article seems like a bunch of BS to me. The author is basically saying that climate scientists are wrong because they have been corrupted by the multi-billion dollar green industry. With out providing any evidence of corruption or any new scientific evidence against global warming. The author then adds a whole bunch of other distracting bits of information that don't really support his core thesis. For example specific climate change research that turned out to be flawed doesn't really make a difference since there's already a huge body of evidence stretching back over half a century. It's basically just a straw man argument.
There is no way to reverse this. Trying to cage this with paperwork will just lead to more of the same creative interpretations à la NSA. So the rulers don't feel the rules apply to them, big surprise. With that in mind, the futility of fighting the tide, what is the next step? As the ideal solution of reversal is unavailable, we need to go with harm reduction - but what is the harm that we would reduce? Most would say the harm is the loss of privacy, but I disagree. I believe the harm is further consolidation of power by those with the means to abuse it. So I would advocate for a democratization of all these spy programs. If the DEA can spy on us, we should be able to spy on the DEA. Any funding request for government programs should include a documented method of direct public access (not FOIA, operator level).
It is no mystery why the Constitution included the provision allowing citizens to arm themselves with the same class of weapons that the government possessed. The memory of tyrannical governance was fresh. Information is no different, if the government posses this information - so should the citizens.
+1, I totally agree. Easier said than done though.