> Cathie Wood’s Ark ETF seems to find the payments margin opportunity, and the gang to get it there. In its Big Ideas 2023 paper, Ark points out that there are 9 steps between Buyer and Seller in a consumer payment transaction, sucking intermediary fees of roughly 2.8% of the value of the purchase. Ark believes enormous money is to be made if the steps between Buyer and Seller would be reduced from 9 to 3 (removing card networks, issuers, and acquirers, for the most part), thereby reducing the expense from 1.64% to 0.21% of the value of the transaction (leaving a massive 2.60% ‘take rate’ for its horse). If you’re looking for crazy, Cathie Wood’s group is a hot mess full of them.
Most of that "take rate" goes to the issuing bank, which returns it to the customer in the form of rewards, which can often be redeemed for cash, and a number of issuers now offer generic 2% cashback cards. There's also the added benefit of fraud protection (and the ability to charge-back, as a last resort). Anyone using Cash App or similar in lieu of a credit card, I just assume is financially illiterate.
> However, OpenAI pinky promises they don't use API data for anything, like training. Maybe that makes you feel a bit safer, although probably it shouldn't.
It doesn't. I don't trust OpenAI or Sama. Frankly, I'm even hesitant to use VSCode now, even with its customizable privacy/telemetry settings (though I can at least limit its network access).
The pearl-clutching over "book banning" is ridiculous. It's parents not wanting schools exposing their children (i.e., minors) to certain materials the parents think is inappropriate. And these supposedly "banned" books are still readily available to adults from Amazon, B&N, and (usually) regular libraries. Why is this such a big deal?
Meanwhile, you now have censorship at the internet backbone level, with ISPs arbitrarily, unilaterally deciding to stop routing traffic to legal websites, and there's been little outcry: https://twitter.com/IncogNetLLC/status/1685359845505957888
It's not just hypocrisy. Many of the HNers railing against this are actually responsible, even if just indirectly, for it. Take Chrome (including Chromium) use, for example. Chrome has never been that much better (e.g. 2-3x) than FF. Maybe at its best, when it first debuted and V8 wowed everyone, it was 20-30% better--not enough to justify the investment a poweruser (who heavily customizes their browser) would have to make to jump ship, and not enough for anyone concerned about the open web. Yet I would guess most people here jumped ship at some point (probably when it was new and shinny and Google still paid lip service to "don't be evil"), and they've never looked back, despite FF having caught up and remaining competitive.
Asking people to not use Chrome isn't asking much, and yet people here can't even manage that.
I wouldn't be surprised if the author, and a large segment of HNers agreeing with her, did a swift about-face when they realized that Tor also provides an end-run around the internet backbone black-holing of IPs that some Tier 1 ISPs did to KiwiFarms last year, during the height of the campaign to deplatform it. More people using Tor in general means more people having the means and know-how to evade censorship, and we can't have that, can we?
I wonder how many HNers angry about this are also some combination of 1) working for bigtech 2) using iOS/OSX/Android instead of Linux (yeah, I know Android is technically a Linux) 3) using Chrome/Safari instead of Firefox and 4) have endorsed, at least in the past, bigtech firms like Google and Cloudflare acting as arbiters of what is/is not acceptable content for the internet, and even whether it should be viewable by anyone at all.
Like one of the commenters in that thread said, this sounds like they were using the noidex feature to use the IA as a personal private backup, and thus abusing it, and ruined it for everyone else. The IA is great as a personal public backup. (For example, I've deliberately submitted copies of certain OSS projects I've worked on to the Wayback Machine.)
Sorry, I wouldn't have been so harsh had I not suspected the entire blog was AI spam. Good luck with your back. (And please do at least some basic resistance training, even just once a week.)
> The text content of the blog is all hand-written by me, not AI, although I do use AI (Stability) to create the header images.
Well, you can't really fault people for suspecting you're using AI for other things too, can you? It's almost a form of gaslighting. You also apparently did an AI-generated podcast? (According to your profile.)
Thankfully, the site is no longer available via clearweb, so we can just take its characterization by its harshest critics at face value, rather than having to actually read it ourselves and make up our own minds.
However, I do find it strange that the site now only being available through Tor--and thus not showing up in Google search results or being easily browsable by "normies"--seems to have been enough to assuage the people spearheading its deplatforming, since Tor should pose little of an impediment to those capable and willing enough to IRL harass and SWAT people (the purported real reason KF exists). It's almost as if their real concern is people being able to google them and find a site that comprehensively documents their bad, and perhaps illegal, behavior.
>The reason the US government has a national debt is because that debt is owed to the Federal Reserve, which is a private bank that loans the US government money and that sets the US monetary policy.
I'm pretty sure every holder of US Treasuries (including me) is owed money by the US government.
It will be interesting to see how this affects "toxic," deplatformed, and to some degree debanked (at least from PayPal and CC processors) entities, like the KiwiFarms. While this page is somewhat vague about the private/public status of the Fed: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm