hedonistbot

The "tons of fashion and crap" that you correctly identify as the elephant in the room is also the main source of employment and income for the majority of the population. The reason we are not doing anything about climate change (and will not do anything in the foreseeable future) is that any meaningful change will require abandoning the market capitalism and growth models that run the world economy. Try selling that to the voters or even here among the more privileged technocrats. Are you willing to take a major cut in your living standard in order to help people in Africa and Bangladesh? It's far more likely that the West builds walls on its borders and as a previous comment said, we start mowing down the hungry masses with machine guns. With the full support of its population of course, under an enlightened and highly developed democratic system.

How about betting on Greece winning the Euro?

None of this would have come to light if the "right" person had won the elections. The moment Trump won, the campaign against social media began, first with the "Fake news" meme, then "Russian hacking", YouTube's adpocalypse and now "Facebook data breach". Some people are getting very scared that the traditional manufacturers of consent are losing their grip on people's minds.

And I am not in support of the mass surveillance exercised by those companies, just noticing the timing. When Obama won, his data scientists were hailed as geniuses. What do you think they were doing?

This video can be called "Microsoft the Good Parts". Also WPF gets only one mention and the future is Azure? So is WPF heading the way of Silverlight?

On a side note, I wasn't aware that the agreement with the US government was meant to expire after ten years. Is it a coincidence that right after that we got the Windows Store push?

> institutions lend .. on many multiples of what they actually have in deposits.

That is not true at all. You are probably thinking of the minimum capital requirements (banks leverage) which measures all lending (bank assets) against their common equity. Deposits and credits are roughly equal and the minimum capital is required to cover mispricing on their assets. And no, banks are not being deregulated in this regard. In fact Basel III which regulates those reserve ratios is much stricter and it took several years for banks to recapitalize to the new minimum levels.

Or you are thinking about the bank's deposit with the fed (the fractional reserve part). But those reserves are not a problem for banks because if there is lack of reserves on the interbank market and the price (interest rate) of borrowing reserve increases above the fed's funds rate, then the Fed steps in and provides the reserves at the rate it wants to keep. This is part of central banking because a central bank cannot simultaneously control the amount of reserves AND the interest rate.

They should already own a ton of bitcoin and someone speculated in a previous thread that their reserves are actually in bitcoin, which would make a lot of sense. The problem here is that every time someone redeems their tether for real dollars, Tether (the company) have to sell part of their reserves and this brings bitcoin price down, in effect dwindling their reserve pool. If there are enough bitcoin buyers or there aren't many people redeeming their tethers for dollars, they should be fine. However, if people lose faith in tether (the coin) then mass redemption will crash bitcoin prices (judging by the daily volumes of tether trading) and there won't be enough reserves to cover everyone at par with the dollar. Hence the pyramid scheme allegations. This is all assuming they don't hold $2+ bn cash in reserves.

Bitfinex and some other exchanges list their crypto prices in USDT and most people trading on their platform probably don't realise this is not dollars. So there's your guaranteed demand. As long as those buyers HODL there is no pressure on USDT.

How about this theory: I can print USDT (by fiat) and buy BTC with it. Now I have a large amount of BTC and propped up price. Then CME starts trading BTC futures against real USD, coincidentally the trading starts at the very top of BTC price. Then I start selling both BTC for dollars AND BTC futures again for dollars (cash settled on expiry). I am making real USD and only started with USDT (supposedly backed by nothing, best case by my BTC wallet). Now that prices are 50% lower and I have tons of USD (or just print more USDT) I can start buying again keeping the price acceptable and ready for another pump before I start selling the next BTC futures contract.

Is this possible. Am I missing something?

Well, I am uninstalling and switching to Iridium right now and it's not JUST because of this Mr Robot thing. I wasn't happy with the direction of Firefox for a while but waited for Quantum to see if things would change. The technology improved, but everything else got worse. So it's time for me to say 'bye, bye' to a browser I've used for more than a decade.

Just came to say that Tom Friedman is a hack and this op-ed reads like a paid commercial. To call a top-down authoritarian power grab "Arab Spring" is mind boggling.

> but none of us gets a free pass from morality, not even in business

What? That's news to me. What about the entire defence industry? What about all the politicians that take a cushy job in the companies they helped during their time in office and who can be directly held accountable by the electorate? And why should anyone question the Saudis when they just signed a multi billion dollar weapon deal with the US government. Your statement sounds very naive.

You don't need a "next", the definition is broad enough to include anything a government would like to prosecute right now.