> A company giving money to the parents of the owner is fraud.
None of those points are actually fraud on their own, except potentially one. The companies use of customers funds would likely fit the definition of fraud, this is unlawful gain.
A company can legally give out loans. Companies give out signing bonuses, salaries, gifts etc, the problem comes down to whether it fits the definition of fraud.
Yes and no. I would like my children to grow up to be a better version of me, one where my mistakes are a foundation for their education, where the good I do they do better etc.
I made up my mind a long time ago that my children can be anything they want, as long as it is good, as long as what they want does not hard others.
I want to introduce my kids to programming, but I also want to see them experience art, sport, and music and everything else the world has to offer. I don't care if they are programmers, I care that they get a bit of an experience at it.
I work in a couple of small teams for a few companies. I have a full time gig and a few part time ones. All the teams are remote, and many are in different timezones and varying a lot, even with language sometimes. In some cases the entire company works remote, from HR to sales to dev.
I don't get the communication issues, nor do I get the project planning issues. Some of the companies are established while others are new, some are one product, others are many.
We have regular catchups, some of the teams I work with even meet in person occasionally.
I think though in the post the 2 bits which stand out to me is the VC reason, but also having a small team and not being able to align them.
I am going to make the judgement that small means less than 10, it is hard to manage teams but it's not that difficult. Teams are not hive minds, and if you cannot align a small team of people who probably spend the majority of their time working individual, then there is something else missing.
The money collected from exclusion fees is quite large, 100s of millions in some cases in a year. The very fact that the collections are so big points to a possible fact that exclusion fees are not a deterrent or stop/reduce locals from gambling.
The problem is, is that it is just not Russia. Other countries are starting to learn that they could be sanctioned or cut off. Not only that the assets of private citizens can be seized easily. Wars happen, conflicts happen after all something similar could have been said about the Middle East.
Buffet and Munger are value investors, there are multiple strategies in both investing and trading. Jim Simmons might be a more relevant example here in regards to trading if you are comparing the two.
I don't know how I feel about this article, especially around the definition of understanding.
I have two children under 6, and if you watch their learning patterns they follow a very much the same path, and mimicry is part of that. They learn the subject matter at hand through repetition, and that then build comprehension which is the basis for understanding.
I think ChatGPT has learnt and started to understand language based on the data given to it, it has built some understanding how language is structured as it is able to regurgitate language.
It has contextual understanding at some level and contextual awareness. One of the next logical questions would be, does it have intelligence and that I don't think is the case. It understanding is based on its understanding of the language.
I think the bike example is a great example, my son is learning to ride a bike. He has no understanding of balance as the article states, he has awareness of it, he knows he needs to peddle to move forward but he has no understanding of inertia, he has to steer but he has no understanding of physics, but he understands all of these components are required and he knows that via data "the experience of learning". I think it would be difficult without prompting to get him to explain his "understanding".
Now understanding is great, you can apply learned information and apply it to another subject. So we can use what we have learned from ridding a bike and apply it to a motorbike. I am unsure if this cross domain transfer of understanding is something which ChatGPT can do, but it does a great job of extrapolating data and apply it to learnt rules.
I think this is relevant to many subjects. I know nothing about cars, but I can probably pick up a book or watch a few videos about and have a reasonable basic knowledge, but there is no way I am going to go out and tune up a car. The learning of many core principles is quite easy, but gain a breadth and depth of knowledge is the difficult part.
A lot of this only comes from the application of skills. I have been programming for a very long time and the amount of information I know I don't know is huge let alone the information I don't know that I don't know.
But then again in my day job I probably do not need to know a lot more than I know, and within that context programming is easy.
> I’ve been using copilot for half a year now and it’s helpful, but often wrong.
I wonder if that is because of the training set, us humans are often wrong or different. If given a room of programmers and asked to implement a Fibonacci algorithm would they all get it right, would they all do it via iteration, recursion, dynamic programming. Co-pilot might not replace you, but it just needs to replace some of those programmers. Then add tools like automated AI reviews or integration tests for example and now you removed another population of tech workers.
I am not sure if that is cause for alarm or the fact that such improvements could be rather beneficial. Some tools will replace people, some will be assistive, and as they improve and other layers are added they will reduce the need for people in areas, improving efficiency and productivity. Robots in manufacturing for example, improve productivity and reduce human labor.
And this leads on to this, these tools are narrow to general and have achieved this in a very short period of time. The cost factors have also massively reduced, if you could pay OpenAI $10 a month to make 1000 mistakes and still deliver code, or a human $120k a year to do the same then which one would you target. AI might not be coming for your job soon but it will be taking away your options to get a job. This is not unique to AI it is the basis for any technological improvement vs labor, yes new ideas and opportunities may come out of this but I don't think they will be equal in volume.
I would say however if you are managing to stay with a range of lifestyle you are probably gaining from new wealth even though it is not extra wealth which you are accumulating in a bank. You are generating new money and that is new wealth. Every year that 80K is new wealth, I am pretty sure that is how the definition is in this case.
A person in Sudan is averaging around $460 US a year, while in the US it is like $74K, and thus Americans are accumulating wealth at a higher percentage.
Also the comparative lifestyle in regards to goods and services are much different. While it might be more expensive to live in the US the lifestyle is dramatically different. Wealth doesn't always mean accumulation.
Singapore is a giant company, that is how the country is run. Fiscal policy plays a major role in the life of everyone in the country, and that is why the country has made such improvements. Foreign investments are very important to Singapore, and do carry weight on decision making.
There is a trade off in every situation, and I believe that for most Singaporeans they are more focused on getting a HDB and $300K car and living in safe, prosperous environment, thus they allow for this type of interference. Right or wrong, it does work to provide the needs to the people.
I lived in Singapore for a few years, I moved there from a western country. I found that even given the laws at that stage that the homosexual community was fairly open, and accepted. The majority of my wife's friends are gay, and open about it.
Singapore is a nice and safe countries but there are definitely trade offs.
I would suggest to you that you need to think of this in a different way.
There are mechanism and then there are legalities.
You may receive a transaction and you have a mechanism to reverse the transaction, but now your account is tagged as the sender is a known tracked account. You have just interacted with a known drug dealer, terrorist, enemy of state etc and you are now by association suspected of wrong doing. Reverse the transaction, your account is still a data point in some database.
Send money to the wrong account, and yes you may stand a high chance of getting it back but you may not.
The situation does differ when it comes to hacks though.
> But if lives (number of lives) matter, and we're unwilling to ban the sale of cigarettes to save lives (which is, lets be honest, not a very impactful thing on normal life of normal people, especially if you do it the new zeland way, by a cutoff year), we basically let all those people die, and we don't care.
I don't know if you can compare smoking to covid, smoking related diseases take years and more likely decades to be deadly.
But in saying that, one way to look at this is via economics. When you are born, you have a potential life expectancy and a potential to earn society money (taxes). Smokers quite often die younger overall and not reaching their value to society, however this is general with many other diseases. Obviously reducing preventable forms of deaths such as those from smoking are to the benefit of society. Whenever you hear that smoking costs the "country" $X billions a year, that is not only the direct costs but also the indirect costs.
I believe in Australia the direct healthcare costs of treating smoking related illness was pegged at some number around 110 million a year, which is substantially different to the promoted cost of billions.
The difference with Covid is that it is an anomaly, perfectly healthy individuals have an increase chance of dying, as well as those who do have other health factors. This number maybe small but it has a large impact on the economy on society in general. Not only is a persons economic value reduced by the direct costs to society are increased.
An example of this, might be, you build a hospital knowing that X amount of smokers will die a year as well as other illnesses. You can calculate this, and work out what type of hospital you need to build. But what you cannot do very easily is calculate an additional 5 million people a year dying over an immediate time. It also takes considerable time to build hospitals, and years to train doctors, as such it is difficult to ramp up quickly to deal with anomalies. Then you must also consider the amount of productivity which is lost when a person is sick, this is also a factor which is calculated in regards to society, and then the publics spending, fear etc.
You can also look at the cost increases in the supply chain, which will affect the economy for years to come. Smokers for example are unlikely to influence the price of wood, but covid has.
So while we should take a pro-active stance against smoking (and when I was smoking I used to say the same), the pandemic is a real-time disaster which cannot be dealt with over 20 years like smoking. People will continue to die from smoking for decades even if you banned it today, but people will die today and potentially from related issues for decades from covid. The effects of covid are immediate, substantial and impactful to society not only right now but likely for some time.
> At that point, aren't you well past the point where more money brings more happiness, even in high cost-of-living places?
I think there are a few different types of people, some who think money buys happiness and too that I disagree. It however can buy other things, comfort, security, even freedom.
> Why not find a job that's fun and fulfilling?
Making money doesn't mean that it is not fun or fulfilling either. Some people also get value in their life from working hard. Working at a FAANG for example, you might work on a project used by millions if not billions of people, some people would find a sense of achievement in that.
> There’s a concerted effort by world leaders to demonize the unvaccinated.
There is a lot a play in The Philippines. First off this goes back to the beginning of his term, and an inquiry into Denguevax which they used to berate the previous President. This forced a lot of people to fear vaccines. Many people are not vaccinated against even the most common illnesses such as Measles, TB etc. Some because they refused to be (religion playing a part) and some because there just aren't the resources.
Then there was issues with supply of vaccines, which made the leadership look incompetent. They had this same line when they could not even acquire vaccines, that they would punish people who did not get vaccinated.
This is his final term with elections this year, and he is facing investigation by the ICC. He is a hardliner who took power, and 1000s if not 10s of 1000s of people died in a drug war which he is clearly a provocateur of. If the opposition gets in, he will likely end up in the Hague, so he needs political support and the country loves hardliners.
The list goes on from there, to corruption in the government health care department, potential corruption in the supply of PPE and other equipment, coming last in many lists of response performance in dealing with covid etc etc.
If it was non-vaccinated people it would be the Church, drug addicts, foreigners or whatever. This isn't demonization of the unvaccinated, it is an Authoritarian response to being a bad situation.
> There are multiple services out there than can send/receive crypto as well as seamlessly convert it to fiat and load a debit card, all through the same service. This basically solves all the issues you illustrate.
This is a last mile issue, those services simply do no exist or are not accessible in other parts of the world.
I agree with you that Crypto is efficient for the transfer of money. But I disagree with you on its frictionless use and availability.
A quick Google search points to the global remittence market being worth over 700 Billion USD annually. A lot of this is not done via banks, they go through 3rd party services such at Western Union, or Zoom or one of many other services. People have been doing money transfers for a long time prior to crypto and without banks and still have not resolved the last mile issue, and crypto hasn't either.
> Diversify - store some of your money across different crypto’s, stable coins, and when you want to use it you can easily do that through a debit card or take out hard cash with the same debit card.
That's pretty hard to do, when there is an ATM for 100KM for some people. But this is the irony, you say that Crypto is without banks, and is more efficient but then you revert back to a banking solution like debit cards to fix the last mile issue. Take away the ATM, take away the debit card, take away the bank, take away the merchants who accept it, you have crypto now in your wallet and you pretty much cannot do a single thing with it. But I guess you can transfer crypto fast.
In some ways I agree. I believe while there are still huge issues with the manufacturing, cultivation etc of drugs, that there are still a multitude of issues which we need to deal with first. That's why I am an advocate of decriminalization, so we sort those issues first.
I have had first hand experience of dealing with immediate family members and friends who have been addicted to legal drugs like alcohol, and illegal drugs like meth. The impact that addiction can have on others who are not addicts is quite disturbing and I have had a mild experience to say the least. I have even struggled with my own addictions.
I think drugs like marijuana is ok, but a drug like meth oh no that's just not good at all. Even alcohol I question a lot, even a quick google search suggest 40% of murders are committed in the USA while under its influence.
Also there are questions about how drugs can be legally sold, I read an article the other day that San Francisco was stopping tax hikes on marijuana stores because of the rise of the illegal marijuana trade. When governments get involved the outcomes are not always as expected. Would legalizing and taxing cocaine for example really stop the mass murders and gang violence in South and Central Americas.
Decriminalize, treat the people with addiction rather than locking them up for possession, educate, etc. That's my thinking.
Neither am I either, I am using Asia as an example because the financial system has similar features to those you mention you desire in a system. There is an entire world out there with many countries (contrary to the world series of baseball), and many of them have different needs and services.
I am a westerner, I grew up having to go into banks to make transactions and I have seen the technical advancements which banks have made over many decades. I moved to Asia, and the financial system here is different. It functions different, many people do not have bank accounts let alone id to open one.
What I am suggesting is that the issues you may have have grown from a market with different drivers. The banks aren't just difficult because they want to be, they need to be. Legislation and regulation has made them that way.
> It doesn’t matter what banking or remittance services are available, crypto not just works, but works in a way that lets you send more money, cheaper, with zero paperwork’s or middlemen. Really frictionless.
You are describing part of the system, not its entirety. It is easy to send money, you could send me 10,000 USD now for an example (feel free to :)), I cannot access it easily. To access it I would have to sell it on Binance, then have the proceeds sent to a virtual wallet. I am fortunate, I have these accounts setup, many people in Asia and other places in the world don't have bank accounts, they don't have id's, they don't even have smart phones. All you are doing is moving blocks on a block chain it's not really moving, while people in other parts of the world still use money as a functional part of their daily lives.
> Like handing cash to someone in real life (which I guess in your world wouldn’t be allowed because you might not get it back)
It's not like that at all. I live in a real cash based economy, one where shops cannot even take credit cards in almost all but the minority of cases. I would not hesitate to say that 99% of transactions in the country which I am currently in are cashed based, real cash, not swiping your credit card, real paper. I would be lucky to find a store which could sell me a banana for a full bitcoin.
Of course I would be worried if I sent 10,000 USD to the wrong person and could not get it back. Now in saying that I am not an opponent to the idea of crypto in fact I have some, I am not sure even if I am proponent of regulation of the crypto industry. But I did need to point out that the problems you mention are because of the attributes of the banking system, in some ways crypto lacks attributes which makes it worse in other areas. If USDT crashes one day, we can compare why the regulation of the banking sector made that industry a better one for example.
> Should you be free to use whatever drug you want?
Your body, your choice? There are many ways to answer this, and no matter how it is answered there will always be a group of people who disagree. This is why as a society we have a framework for making those decisions which sometimes gets it right and sometimes gets it wrong.
If we legalized all drugs and let people do what they want, do we stop a 10 year old from taking meth, after all it their choice. I think it would be absurd to have 0 restrictions, but that would go against the concept of being able to make free choices.
> Do doctors hold any responsibility over getting you addicted by drugs they prescribe? (Aren't doctors the experts?)
If they prescribed them outside of the boundaries of their professional framework, then yes.
> Now that marijuana is legal, should you sue the legal stores if you get addicted?
You buying marijuana intentionally is a little different from being under the mindset that a licensed medical professional (and health system) is acting within your best interest. Part of this problem also is Purdue mislead people on the addictiveness of their product.
However in saying the above, there is a lot more to this than just supplying a drug. They broke other laws such as the anti kickback.
None of those points are actually fraud on their own, except potentially one. The companies use of customers funds would likely fit the definition of fraud, this is unlawful gain.
A company can legally give out loans. Companies give out signing bonuses, salaries, gifts etc, the problem comes down to whether it fits the definition of fraud.