lolcraft

Crazy-person level of attention to detail. Not good. Not adequate. It asks for perfection, or lunacy: both of which are abusive to ask for. [1]

They run conventions. Obviously they want their IT guy around to help set everything up. [...] How do you mitigate that?

Try hiring four people to do the job of four people. If they fucked up the wifi because their intern-slave is busy updating the site's CSS, managing the databases, backing up the file server, fixing the wifi, carrying down the booths, making coffee, cleaning the toilets, and has to catch a plane for Kuala Lumpur tomorrow at 6 a. m., guess who's failing at his job. And it's not the guy making the coffee.

'on-call 24/7' - Again, this is normal.

Maybe it's normal, but that doesn't mean those who accept it for a pittance are not suckers.

[1] "Oh, but they're joking, it's hyperbole". I presume the salary is a joke too?

Inflation has never been a problem since Paul Volcker in 1982. In fact, the moniker Great Moderation should be more properly called Great Moderation of Inflation -- since not much was moderate apart from that, as exemplified by the crashes of 1987 and 2008, and the bubbles; but I digress.

We had about 10, 20 years of the lowest level of inflation in history across the board, maybe 2% per annum or so. Everyone nowadays is obsessed with Zimbabwe, or the ex-Soviet Unions, or the Diocletian Roman Empire, but those are red herrings, minor blips in a sea of (excessive) financial restraint. Inflation is not a problem today.

In fact, deflation is a problem today. Large part of the German restructuring, so lauded everywhere, was helped by inflation in Spain and Italy. (Granted, it wasn't much, maybe 4% per year, but even so.) Now the ECB refuses to return the favor: the ECB won't let inflation go above 2%, twisting the knife in Southern Europe's rib-cage and pissing everyone off. Meanwhile, the US, as most of the West and Japan, remains eyeballs deep in a liquidity trap: you could print the equivalent of the Michigan Lake in one dollar bills, and the Consumer Price Index wouldn't register a blip.

If your start-up were a big bank, you could tomorrow borrow money from the government at a real negative rate. You could borrow a billion dollars, store it in a bank account, pay in 10 years the principal and profit handsomely with the interest. For nothing. That's how low inflation is, today. The Fed is (used to be) desperately trying to increase it, as we speak, with not much effect.

In economic terms, a moderate (actually very low, in historical terms) 4% rate across the board would in fact benefit the system. If you can profit decently by storing money, nobody wants to get their lazy asses from the couch and invest. And the guys who have money don't want to spend it, either -- they're winning money, why spend? Thus a crisis. You have to whip their asses with the printing press, so that they don't get cozy.

The world should still move towards full legalization: use and trade.

This is important for this discussion, because exchange rates ultimately won't matter that much. By "ultimately", I mean that phase of development when (if) BitCoin becomes a full currency, that is, when there's somebody, some corporation, operating and trading significantly in the currency. I won't lend the status of currency to any commodity which is not used this way.

And what's clear is that both BitCoin and gold are shit currencies. Even conceding the exchange rate could stabilize enough for a modern day Rockefeller[2] to pull it to a success, you still would have to contend with the deflation inherent in this "currency".

There's a reason why gold is traded in commodities markets -- and not as a currency. There's a reason why banks and states trade and store USD, instead of gold. You simply can't grow an economy like it's the 20th century with gold, or BitCoin. In fact, BitCoin is even more ruthless than gold. 19th century economies could at least pray for the discovery of a gold vein, to alleviate their deflationary comedowns. BitCoin denies even this possibility with the cold, germanic efficiency of a mathematical proof.

[0] The exchange rate we run against our future selves, if you will.

[1] Which doesn't count anyhow, since you would agree there's a risk markup on them for their illegal status, which makes dubious extrapolating any analysis from them.

[2] An improbably apt group of entrepreneurs, who even more improbably would decide to bet their future fortunes on a currency designed by computer geeks with a penchant for goldbuggering.

That's not an argument for HFT. If HFT is useless, then it has divested a great amount of research into technologies that no one really wanted otherwise, i. e., that the social cost of HFT is greater. Standard microeconomics.

The question is, what's HFT good for? Do its benefits outweigh its costs? I believe they don't. Low-quality liquidity under the 1s frame is not only useless for traders, it has a great social cost, in the form of research diverted to this inane game. The only plausible arguments I've found for HFT claim that HF traders wouldn't profit if it wasn't useful -- which is really just begging the question; a circular argument.

(a) Games of tomorrow will be made to host creative communities, which almost mandate those games to be for desktops. It's just too awkward to do serious modding work in a tablet.

(b) What is really worrying about the PC is not the format being outdated -- Minecraft, LoL, TF2 and WoW attest to its potential. What's wrong is Microsoft awkwardly replicating mobile ecosystems. Creating videogames now is all about novelty, taking ideas to market fast, and growing cool communities around these games. This just can't happen, when your platform maker is Big Brother's whiny, lazy cousin.

All in all, I just don't get why the Droid Brigade is so enthused about mobile gaming. It's probably an USian localism. The cons: Android smartphones are slow and jerky and shit; the iPhone is like Manhattan if it were a North Korean gulag; fat-fingering your way around is the shittiest of input methods; and most of the games are preheated gimmicks, tastelessly exploited before the camera until boredom strikes.

Anyway, that sports and education are so tangled is purely a national oddity of the US, maybe stemming from its tradition of great, and expensive, private universities. During the 19th century, if I recall correctly, it was a sign of distinction and wealth to practice sports; I conjecture that's what got it started in the universities, and then it spread in the early 20th century, when those colleges started courting new talent, intellectual or otherwise, from the up and coming middle classes, helped by the New Deal and the GI Bill.

That could also be why Oxford and Cambridge are relatively so keen on sports, i.e. rowing, as compared to other European universities. Sports were quite the posh thing back then. But, of course, I'm just guessing.

In cryptography, if you break 1 bit, you've broken it. No excuse.

I think I already posted here about this, some eons ago. To recap: this strategy is bad. It's let's take Nintendo from a powerful stance as both platform maker and virtuoso first party developer, to Oversized Third Party Developer in a market notorious for:

(a) Low quality and extremely low fidelity demand, which prizes being cheap and having a gimmick over everything.

(b) Notoriously capricious primma donnas such as Apple and Samsung as platform makers, which take insane cuts from developers.

(c) Being an extremely fragmented market, with thousands of devices with very different characteristics and software which Nintendo would have to support.

Selling Nintendo to Apple is the business equivalent of folding a royal flush. Yeah, so the iPad sold 100 million units. The DS sold 154 million. For a single purpose device. The 3DS might be 20% behind its predecessor's curve -- a ridiculously successful curve, if I might say -- but that's still a cold 124 million units. The Wii was a fad, true... and it redefined the meaning of fad itself, selling 100 million units; a one model, single-purpose device. When factored into this that Nintendo profits from third party software -- unlike Rovio, which has to pay its dutiful tides to petulant lovers by excellance Apple and Samsung -- one starts clearly seeing how Nintendo is pulling ass like Brad Pitt at a wet t-shirt contest. Absolutely insane. Not even Steve Jobs could dream of selling a gadget so well as the 3DS does.

Not to mention that, again, in this business if you're a third party developer, either your name is Activision, or you're into masochism. Lose power, lose the platform, and you lose everything that makes you strong.

Edit: and I don't even like the Wii U.