I know very little about how the different voices there are moderated/synthesized I to what's shown. It's just an anonymous black box machine to me. But tes, it is a recent example of crowdharvesting some opinion!!
It’s really hard to not look at a train wreck in progress. Especially when it comes with a large drink of schadenfreude and a bucket of virtual popcorn.
I’m sad for what the destruction of Twitter and the people it affects, but at least the fireworks are cool.
Usually this is too vacuous of a criterion for comments on any other topic on HN. For some reason any post on Twitter has pages and pages of “yikes” “derp”, people gossiping about “Elon” like he’s their wayward cousin. Pathetic.
Elon is a cautionary tale about what can happen when a slightly clever, asocial, ADHD, internet troll finds himself with more money than God. He is the archetypal HN user gone off the deep end. This is like a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future for most of us.
I'm afraid I see many similarities with that older wayward cousin, John McAfee.
I truly hope Musk finds help, or finds that his coffers are harder to deplete than Johns, but it's not looking good.
"we", the hacker-crowd, indeed have some lessons to learn here.
I've only known one person brave enough to stand up to a toxic ceo in an "all hands" in 40 years of working. It's surprisingly hard to do. Nobody is really trapped but it can be very hard to just walk. I didn't. I wish I had.
Anyone in any kind of social media role, pretty much. And, although not literally forced, many others cannot ignore the advantage the platform brings: writers, gamedevs, journalists, etc.
>For example, if you’re looking at static inequality, Europe appears to be more egalitarian than the United States—their wealth is more evenly distributed across the population. But Taleb uses some statistics of dynamic inequality that propose America may be fairer than Europe. In Europe, more than a third of the five hundred wealthiest people inherited their wealth from family dynasties that have lasted for centuries. Compare this to the US, where 90% of the wealthiest five hundred people entered that list less than thirty years ago.
>Here’s another statistic on dynamic equality in America: 10% of Americans will spend at least one year in the top 1% of income earners, and more than half of all Americans will spend at least a year in the top 10% of income earners. Since what we’re trying to do is allow the market to reward those who contribute to society, greater turnover among the rich in the United States is a sign of fairness.
The problem is decline in elitism(in the arts, in politics, in the academy..) but nobody wants to hear that in these populist times. Democracy+markets are working extremely well for the masses, giving them exactly what they want.
Ted Gioia the music critic has made a lot of good observations on these issues. In particular, artists, intellectuals and politicians of old used to lead, persuade, and pull their audience along with them. Today, everyone simply panders.
"On the startup bailout. It is claimed that the startups who put all their cash in SVB will now be forced to close, so get going with the bailout now. It is not startups who lose money, it is their venture capital investors, and it is they who benefit from the bailout.
Let us presume they don't suffer sunk cost fallacy. You have a great company, worth investing $10 million. The company loses $5 million of your cash before they had a chance to spend it. That loss obviously has nothing to do with the company's prospects. What do you do? Obviously, pony up another $5 million and get it going again. And tell them to put their cash in a real bank this time."
I'm not sure why this analysis assumes that the startup doesn't have $5 million of debt or somehow gets back the equity they sold.
They're not in the same position they were before. If you're worth 10 million when you have five million in the bank, you are now worth 5 million without it.
If you sold half your company to get the first 5 million, why would keep working if you have to sell the other half?
Just my 2c as a startup guy - this is patently absurd. VC's would not just write checks for millions again after such huge losses. Many, many startups would shut down and the entire startup/VC ecosystem would be devastated.
>Hilary Allen, a law professor at American University, thinks crypto is inherently susceptible to boom-and-boost cycles and manipulation by insiders, and thinks it should be banned.
I don’t know or care much for crypto, but man does it bring out Ayn Rand villains you thought only existed in books.
