slivym

> The real question is: Will Elizabeth serve the purpose of your fund — or by investing in her, will you simply be serving her purpose of writing her rise-from-the-ashes narrative?

I think pretty clearly there are VCs who are quite cognizant that their main advantage is their marketing, and making a big splashy controversial investment serves that marketing well. A16Z don't give a damn if they throw 50m at a bad investment, that's not how the game works- they already know most of their 50m investments will fail, so if that investment can keep their name out there so they get access to the funding rounds of the ones that succeed? It's worth it.

People talk about this being a replacement for busses, but I think that misunderstands what a bus service is. A bus service generally is a utility provided by the local government to meet the needs of constituents. The routes are determined by what the government decides are useful, not by which routes are profitable. The problem with introducing competition to this system is that a universally provided bus service is going to have profitable and unprofitable routes and cross-subsidization. If you introduce a new service that's private you're going to find that service very quickly identifies and competes for the profitable routes, but it won't have an interest in the unprofitable routes. Suddenly the local utility is more unprofitable than before, there's no reason for it to be running on routes that are now serviced by the private company, and now the private company can start extracting a higher and higher premium on the profitable routes.

They're not a charity. What do you want them to do? Hire $100Bn worth of engineers until their net income is 0? The possibly difficult truth at Google is that there's probably <1% of the company that is really essential to their monopolistic search business. The rest are either working on other projects which might be strategically interesting but not essential, or are working on the core product but not in a way that's driving business. Is it wrong for the management to say "We need to be efficiently investing shareholder capital" or for the market to be looking at Google and saying "We want your money spinning monopoly business please, not your eccentric other bets thanks".

I've got to say - I found it REALLY difficult to find an authoritative or trustworthy source on what the link tax is.

From my understanding here's the rub: there are two definitions. One definition is you'd have to pay a publisher if you link to their article whilst quoting it. That's what the opponents are saying. This seems disingenuous, since it's the quoting the article that triggers the tax - no the link.

The supporters characterize it as: If you rip off a significant part of a copyright work the publisher can charge you since you're taking their copyrighted work (whether you link to them or not).

Now people are saying sites link Google News would be affected because they list lots of news sites quotes with links to the source. I would've thought it was pretty obvious however, if the aggregater quotes enough then there's no point to click through and therefore the revenue accrues to Google rather than the publisher. This seems fine to me -- there should be a charge for that behaviour. What's more it actually seems self-levelling. If Google doesn't quote too much and people click through then there's no incentive for the publisher to charge Google for the content since they're generating demand and charging Google would cause them to be de-listed.

So let's move on, why is Google complaining? Well it seems to me that it's actually in Google's interests to be able to leech off these publishers by stealing their content wholesale and this would prevent that, and apparently they think whining publicly is a reasonable strategy. It's not.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to be saying that Sci-fi writers were making accurate predictions of what would happen in the future and when. Heinlein doesn't write about space because he thought it would happen at a particular time, it's because it opened doors into interesting stories and new ways of thinking about things whilst relating back to what already exists. It's less about what is going to happen and more about what's interesting. Personally I think even today we struggle to write good stories with that cope with the existence of instant access to every other person on the planet and every fact known to man.

It's quite amazing how good a job Silicon Valley does considering how badly wrong it could go (I'm looking at you Big Bang Theory). I'm sure there are quite a few industries that could have similar comedies about them from people who really know what the industry is like. W1A is another great example.

I think there's a serious point to what you're saying. I was bought up in the UK so I have metres for short distances and miles for long distances. If you say to me 5 miles I instantly know what you mean. If you say 8km, I have an academic understanding but not really an intuitive feel for what you mean (other than 8km=5mi, feel 5mi).

The business model appears to be to get established and then use a combination of network effects and monopolistic pricing techniques to be profitable. The problem is though, you need to establish yourself as the dominant player, and jack up prices to start being profitable. That's a fine business strategy. The problem is that Uber has an outside clock ticking. The first player to economically produce a fleet of self-driving cars is likely to undercut Uber on price so violently that Uber's business model goes up in smoke pretty quick.

So either Uber wins the race to autonomous vehicles (which I think most people now regard as unlikely) or they have a hard limit on when their profitability is going to go away. So the valuation needs to reflect something along the lines of "How much money can uber make between now and 2025" and every year that goes by without profit, is a year towards the day that uber's business model goes poof!

I would've thought it's self-evident that if the problem isn't real then you're never going to fix it. If the reason this problem exists is a political tool for the right wing then the way to stop it won't be to pander to it.

Sorry but you're going to have cite some real sources, not right wing propaganda. I mean, I read the entire article and I still for the life of me can't actually understand on what basis the academic paper was 'erased'. I assume that's because this 'article' is written by the person who is pushing an agenda rather than an actual reporter reporting on the facts of an incident. Frankly the whole thing reads as 'Those nasty people are idiots and dont want people hearing how amazing my work is because then everyone will know how stupid they are!'. I mean really, it's very difficult to actually get any factual information about what happened. It's kind of difficult for me to have sympathy if the only reports of this happening are far right blogs where the author themselves is reporting what happened.

What does this have to do with being an academic? Does this change if you're a notable employee of a company? I don't think so. If you are in a situation where your personal reputation effects the reputation of your employer then you need to take that into consideration when you speak publicly.

I've got to say, I can't actually call to mind any instances of controversial peer-reviewed papers. I can point to the Bell Curve- that was controversial, but it was a also a book written by a conservative political operative that made specific governmental policy recommendations. That seems like an entirely different topic to me. Or for another example let's take Jordan Peterson, he's quite clearly written lots of academic papers. But are those controversial?

Not really, he's widely regarded as a fine professor of psychology. But does that really wave a magic wand over his head and grant him immunity from being judged for the self-help books he publishes? I don't think anyone reasonable person would agree with that. Also, what protection does pseudonymous authorship afford him? He's literally making a career out of touring different countries giving speeches about the moral decay of western culture.

Here's my question: Does this problem actually exist? Or is this misplaced fear about a different issue that actually does exist.

Despite the routes terminating at China's firewall I don't think it's a good guess to say this was necessarily a Chinese attack. It seems like the interference of the Chinese firewall was simply a side-effect of the new path the network traffic was going. If you were perpetrating this attack it seems more advantageous to re-route the traffic and allow it continue working rather than discoverably interfering with the traffic. Plus if you were going to try to block the route, there's probably a better way of doing it.

I hate this debate. Firstly, this headline is terrible - the BBC basically states that Universities do not censor speech and the facts back them up. They make the perfectly valid point that practically all 'censorship', 'no platforming' and 'protests' cited are actually carried out by independent bodies such as student unions. The Spectator is just factually wrong, they're trying to conflate debates about what are valid ideas to discuss between independent political bodies at universities with the idea that the universities themselves are taking an active role in censoring speech which is incorrect.

Secondly, and more broadly though - it should be down to the people at university to decide what they discuss, what should be beyond discussion at their university and how those ideas should be discussed. No student is restrained from going outside of their campus to discuss ideas either. It's also not the same thing stopping someone speaking and stopping someone using university resources to speak. What this debate actually seems to be about is older, right wing people attempting to force their right wing view points into universities that simply aren't receptive to them. It's not good enough for Tom Slater that students simply don't want to hear his fact-free anecdata about censorship. The arguments simply don't stand up to basic scrutiny- if the problem is that Tommy Robinson is having his free speech curtailed, then quick! Take down those videos of him standing on stage outside the high court, take down that interview at the Oxford Union, censor those pictures of him having lunch in the House of Lords. But if one of the most famous right wing campaigners is being censored then I need a bit more evidence for it than just the convicted fraudsters word for it.

But it's not the precision that's arbitrary it's the range. If your number format represents 0-100 and you want to represent 200 then your number format isn't imprecise, it's limited range.