I agree, but that's saying because credit card suck in way X, they should suck in way Y as well to accommodate. Stolen credit card information shouldn't be a thing, and people shouldn't be passing security critical 20+4 digit codes around (think oauth).
"Not everybody is like me" would be the number 1, number 2 and number 3 advice I would give to anyone who's trying to start an online business. Like in a "How about you do that as a mantra for 10 hours a day" kind of way, because it's truly astonishing how many people don't get that.
So if you want to cut costs on sales and marketing in your startup, internalize that, because customer acquisition costs are directly related to your not understanding of that principle.
Good thing such a high profile influencer will hammer that point home!
or if you're going to ask them their age just display age appropriate content. Automatic categorizing of even user generated stuff should be a pretty much solved problem by now
What is "age appropriate" changes by the year, and is not universally agreed upon by everyone. I'm not sure that is a problem that will ever actually be solved.
As for categorizing content in general, I think it's pretty safe to look at Facebook and Twitter for examples of content moderation failing in spectacular ways, just as it is by all of the horror stories of Google accounts being automatically locked for utterly unclear reasons because some automated system picked up some cue and erroneously banned the account.
I've been staring at your comment trying to decide if it's intentional smugness or ignorance. I'm going to assume good faith.
There were multiple countries with little to no impact from the GFC[1]. These countries include billions of people, and significant portions of the worlds GDP. Most western economies had recovered in 3-5 years[2].
Not everyone felt it and felt it hard, nor was this everywhere. I'm not arguing semantics, for billions of people it was effectively a non issue.
I'm not up to date on the science, but my dad was old - born in '43 - and worked as a teacher, so he could see several generations grow up. He was tall for his generation, but by the time I was a teenager, he was tiny even compared to his teenage students. I was a head taller than him even before he started "old man shrinking".
He always pointed at food, that the generations after him had access to better stuff and more milk. The shortest member of my family is my niece who is totally anti-milk, but that's just anecdata.
So it might be some other macro-factor influencing growth, with milk being the most glaringly visible item on the table. But it does kind of make an intuitive sense, and the dutch are freakishly tall while they have some of the best dairy products in the world
Which makes it even more interesting. One of the most head scratching pieces of this puzzle that SBF got truckloads of VC money with laughable fundraising rounds + no board seats.
It didn't make any rational sense.
Unless the logical conclusion is that it means 'zero liability'.
Well, once all these go down the prices of currencies will also come down, which affects even those who had their coins in cold wallets - unless they plan to hold without making a profit until the heat death of the universe
That's obviously not what was being talked about in this context. The discussion was about being affected by suspended withdrawals if exchanges never give people their deposits back.
That's because gergov and tartoran were not making woah's point about people who don't have accounts at exchanges. They were making their own related point in reply, also about people who don't have accounts at exchanges, being damaged by price drops in the wake of problems at exchanges.
The difference is that house prices were for material objects that people actually need, and sales are supported by a huge industry of agents, lawyers, and governments to facilitate the safe transfer of houses.
None of that exists in the crypto space. The exchanges control the price and regularly trade against their own customers, and recent events have shown that they are all co-mingled and propping each other up.
Exchanges going down is bad news even if you keep your coins in your own wallets. With the exchanges gone, actually using your coins will become much harder. Worse, as power consolidates among fewer exchanges the price becomes even easier to manipulate.
An important reason that house prices went up in the years following 2008 is because the federal reserve printed over a trillion dollars to buy mortgage backed securities to add liquidity to the housing market [1]. Houses have a real value, yes, but that value was propped up well beyond the fundamentals (similar to crypto) and got a "bailout" (which crypto will hopefully not get).
The Fed printed money to prop up the price of derivatives, not the price of house. Huge difference. Houses themselves fundamentally have intrinsic value as an asset.
A currency has no intrinsic financial investment value. Especially not an arbitrarily created crypto currency.
The only reason it's price would go up is people speculating that someone else will want to speculate on it in the future, and will pay a premium to do so.
We all know what it looks like when the future speculators dry up.
> The Fed printed money to prop up the price of derivatives, not the price of house.
I'm not sure your point here. Derivatives absolutely are a driver on the price of the underlying assets. Derivatives are what inflated the housing bubble prior to 2008.
I generally agree with you that homes have an intrinsic value, and that currencies do not necessarily have that. But that intrinsic value of homes was probably around the bottom of the 2008 housing market, not the top. On either side of that, home values exceeded the fundamental value due do manipulation or excessive leverage. In my mental model, fundamental value merely establishes a price "floor" of a market, but beyond this price floor every market is subject to mania and bubbles. For housing, the fundamental floor is non zero, for crypto, you could argue that it is zero.
> The only reason it's price would go up is people speculating that someone else will want to speculate on it in the future, and will pay a premium to do so.
This is true for housing also. Having a intrinsic value does not mean that housing prices should be expected to go up forever. As a clear counter example, deflationary goods like computers have a clear intrinsic value, but are not a good investment as they will almost certainly lose value.
> Derivatives are what inflated the housing bubble prior to 2008.
Yes derivatives are a big part of what inflated the bubble prior to 2008, but the fed purchasing them didn't do anything to maintain home prices.
The combination of (ARMs + low interest rates) and lenders being able to immediately flip mortgages to other to be combined in CDOs and other MBS derivates inflated housing. Lenders could make loans that they knew borrowers could not repay, but because it would be off their books before that time hit they continued to make them. Derivatives inflated the bubble.
But as rates continued to rise, ARMs began to reset, and buyers at the new prices dried up, prices began to crash and people began to walk away from homes. This immediately dropped home values and caused MBSes to devalue quickly. Demand for MBSes dropped immediately. Lenders stopped making loans because they realized they could no longer flip to loans to others to securitize them. As nobody wanted to buy a MBS now. This dried up the demand side, plus foreclosures added to supply side.
The fed stepped in and began buying close to worthless MBS for way above value not because of any impact on the housing market (overall MBS demand was still enormously down), but because they were buying them above their value to prop up the market so financial companies could still price them to "market" on their books and (via façade) maintain their capital requirements. They also purchased them to help inject capital into the markets and take more MBS off their book. The fed purchased these to prop up the financial system - it had nothing to do with home prices and had little impact on home prices. Lenders stopped pushing unviable loans to borrowers because they now held the risk. And they would hold the risk regardless.
The fed didn't prop up the housing market in 2008, they propped up the financial markets because so many people tried to get rich quick off mortgage backed securities and the bubble burst.
The bubble is now bursting in crypto. As you said, the floor for crypto (with little to no intrinsic value) is zero. The only question is how close to it's intrinsic value will it fall.
Wall St. pushed hard to keep MBSes unregulated, they formed a bubble and then fell back to close to their intrinsic value. Their intrinsic value was maybe 30% off of their peak value. (Maybe a bit lower, but due to the illiquid nature of housing the market never fully fell to it). So now crypto also unregulated has pushed a bubble, how far does it have to fall to hit its intrinsic value?
You are making this too complicated. If the fed did not buy any MBS, what would have happened to home prices in the long run? Financial markets would have failed, and then home prices would have plummeted.
That's like saying "Avoiding nuclear war is propping up the housing market. If we have nuclear war then society ends, the population collapses and the housing market with it. So avoiding nuclear war is propping up the housing market."
It's a terrible analogy to attempt to make. And it's wrong.
The difference between nuclear war and a market is much much wider than the gap between derivatives and the underlying market. It is your straw man analogy that is ridiculous. Look, the Fed itself says that the goal of MBS purchase is to support housing markets:
> What was the policy objective of the Federal Reserve's program to purchase agency mortgage-backed securities?
The goal of the program was to provide support to mortgage and housing markets and to foster improved conditions in financial markets more generally.
Bullshit. It exists, it's just that the UI/UX is awful and most people in the developed world have no need for it. But they do exist. My work on hub20 [0] is exactly that, to have a system that would let people and communities create their actual self-custodial "crypto banks".
I should have made myself clearer - none of that (agents, lawyers, etc) exists in crypto _apart_ from the exchanges, which are meant to facilitate the transfer of crypto assets.
The two problems with this setup are:
* The exchanges are dishonest and unregulated.
* The exchanges are exploding like a chain of firecrackers.
So crypto is going from a state of having most transactions go through dishonest exchanges to being in a state where people own crypto but trading will become almost impossible.
Is the price going to go up? Will it go down? It doesn't matter, since without exchanges you can't actually use it for anything.
Exchanges don't need to act as long duration custodians for them to serve their purpose or be profitable. Exchanges will make a profit from trading fees. They can attract capital and liquidity via market maker fee rebates. You can trickle your capital through an exchange to make a large trade incrementally and only ever risk an arbitrarily small percentage of your total capital. There are ways to run exchanges in a much less sketchy way, that while not perfect, would make the kind of horrific abuse of customer funds that FTX did not possible. For example, merkle tree proof of reserves.
> since without exchanges you can't actually use it for anything
Before repeating your baseless argument, please read about my project. Start with the about page. Understand that we can have global commerce with crypto without the big centralized exchanges. It's only an issue of scaling down and accepting that even though "trust" is needed for efficient transactions, this can happen at a much lower level.
No one 'needs' more than like 1% of a house. I have lived for months out of a bivouac, about $100 worth of nylon.
A house is 99% crypto and 1% "need."
Crypto follows a similar trajectory. The vast majority is speculatory and un-"need"ed bullshit and a tiny slice is stuff where it has a comparative advantage to traditional finance/money.
Also this is a funny argument. If these things are truly making people dumber but the change is happening on a generational level, then a dumber generation would not realize that it is dumber than the previous one.
It's also further muddied by other changes - like changes in education in the past 50 years - which makes the phenomenon harder to isolate and to judge.
Marketing ROI is very tricky to measure. On the other end, you would see that the more you spend the more customers you have. The question is: are those new customers due to your increased spend or not? There's all sorts of attribution magic that goes in the background to trace back adcampaigns to converting users (especially across devices). That's why the article mentions that most of the "big fraud" that was uncovered by simply turning off paid campaigns without conversions dropping. That's a pretty big giveaway that something is amiss.
There's an old saying in advertising that we know half of our budget is wasted, we just don't know which half. Ad fraud and bot traffic live in that area, kind of as expected waste.
Then there's the other issue - branding campaigns also cost an arm and a leg, and the most you get is vanity metrics like reach and likes and impressions and whatnot, which have dubious correlations with reality but they look nice on dashboards.
I used to own a digital agency. I had a client who was the 80 year old CEO of a 120 year old military contractor. He sat through a meeting where his 27 year old marketing manager and I walked through advertising metrics for digital ads. At the end he said,
“This is all very interesting, and will be helpful for Kelly (the marketing manager). I’m going to decide if we renew next year with this: increase in sales divided by ad spend. I’m looking for a number greater than 3.”
This is the dichotomy. The company’s purchasing the ads want to spend based on conversions - the ad companies want to charge based on impression or clicks (if forced).
They did. We got them 5.2, but it was very hard, and it was also very good for our team to have to deal with a hard metric target. We got a lot better at ad buys.
