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You are referring to the Black Death and that didn’t occur until around 350 years after the end of what are colloquially known as the Dark Ages.

There was also The Plague of Justinian in the 6th century which may have been more devastating than the Black Death.

So you both can read other people's minds yet are also entirely ignorant about major well known historical events? Fascinating.

I’ve worked with both. Retailers are not generally sophisticated investors; they don’t necessarily lose money, but if they don’t own the real estate, they are usually making less than they could have working a job and investing their earnings in an index fund. There is a similar trend with most small businesses outside of the knowledge sector. Real estate investors who buy, hold, or develop property professionally are almost always far more sophisticated, which is to say that they are more knowledgeable of the tradeoffs involved in their investments and can thus take calculated risks in order to achieve a particular outcome.

People make suboptimal investments all the time. This can be the result of lifestylism (“I want to be a retailer!”), naiveté (“I’ll figure out the financials later.”), or path dependence (“I’ll become a retailer because it’s the only thing I know about.”).


Yes. Fine. That's a more reasonable framing than that the goal of landlords is "to suck the lifeblood of people and businesses".

There’s no evidence to suggest that any of this is true.

At $30 an hour, $6,000 would cover 10 hours a day for 20 days per month.

> https://zulip.com/values/

Every word of this page appears as its own line on mobile.


You don’t necessarily need it to learn during the game, it would be enough for it to learn between games. If you’ve played the game long enough there are behaviors you can exploit that wouldn’t work against a human player. They iterated on the AI in Beyond the Sword and fixed some of the more abusable mechanics in Civilization V (e.g. by introducing diplomatic penalties when you camp units next to an AI’s borders), but it’s just inevitable that once you’ve played a game long enough you will find these kinds of exploitable patterns.

The customization available in IV makes it basically infinitely replayable, but the AI makes the trajectory of each game too predictable if you understand the mechanics well enough.

Lots of old strategy games have been revived by introducing new factions that change the game’s meta; imagine if this process was automated by training the AI on recorded games from the entire playerbase, or on games recorded locally to adapt to the user’s unique style of play.


These look to all be incidences of people who were convicting of defrauding TARP, which I doubt most people would even remember. Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling told me the credit rating agencies rubber-stamped bad derivatives and that banks were giving out loans without income verification. Did any executive or director ever go to jail for that?

Lots of loan officers and auditors were jailed, yes (more of the former than the latter, IIRC)

> Lots of loan officers and auditors were jailed, yes

Do you have any names?


First article is about TARP fraud. The other three are all 404.

Sorry: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2015/09/02/b...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/former-president-and-ceo-...

https://oig.federalreserve.gov/releases/news-bekkedam-senten...

That's literally just from the first page of Google results, which you are also free to use if you want to learn more about this.

And btw "it's just TARP fraud" is an idiotic thing to say: the fraud was in misrepresenting the banks' positions prior to the crash during the TARP audit.


> And btw "it's just TARP fraud" is an idiotic thing to say: the fraud was in misrepresenting the banks' positions prior to the crash during the TARP audit.

People want CEOs to go to jail for knowingly playing a role in causing the crash. Misrepresenting banks' positions afterwards isn't it.


Misrepresenting banks' positions was the actual cause of the crash though

The people committing TARP fraud may have been the same people that caused regular working people to lose their homes, businesses, and retirement funds, but unless that venn diagram is pretty clearly overlapped I think you're misunderstanding what the general public was / is upset about.

I know there were some really large settlements in 2012 and onward, but for everyone I know who lost their business or their home or their investments, I don't know anyone who received any of this settlement money.


> "it's just TARP fraud" is an idiotic thing to say

Some people might consider it idiotic to post 3 broken links to articles they clearly haven’t read; others would simply consider it obnoxious.

> the fraud was in misrepresenting the banks' positions prior to the crash during the TARP audit.

TARP fraud wasn’t what caused the crisis. The popular narrative is that the credit rating agencies failed to do due diligence because they were making a lot of money handing out high ratings on junk CDOs. So far as I know, no one involved in this went to jail. People were angry about the events that led up to the crisis not being punished; most probably didn’t even know about the fraud that went on with the program set up to bail out the banks after the fact.


If you use someone else’s money you have to pay him back with interest or equity.


> you have to pay him back with interest or equity

That's the price for infinite scaling. If a business can't make more than that it should be shut down.

i.e. do you want to make 25% of 1 billion or 5% of 1000 billion?


The point the great-grandparent is making is that Google could comfortably finance the project itself and make 100% of the upside, not 25% or 5%.


And the point here is borrowing more money increases available funds for bigger rewards. Google can fund 1 Waymo but not an infinite amount of them.


YouTube got to where it is by making intentional moves to be the only game in town. They aren’t the most user-hostile platform by any means, but they have been coasting on the network effects of backlogged content for close to a decade now. Even if a competitor could deal with network and storage costs, and somehow manage to attract a network of uploaders, the platform would be 20 years behind, and there’s certain content (e.g. older content) that you simply wouldn’t ever be able to find there in any appreciable quantity.


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