I'm working on a site that basically groups you into a cohort of like-minded Yang supporters and helps you accomplish simple but helpful stuff online. Things like favoriting a tweet seem tiny, but if every yang supporter did it, the difference would be huge. Especially just raising his visibility online since only half of democrats even know who he is.
Open to any and all feedback - getting people on the internet to do anything at all is insanely hard, but could be the best chance we have bots, false info and astroturfing.
Would it be appropriate to ask our users of our startup to and vote for us on here? If they are invested enough in our service and community to do so, it seems like that would be a very positive and useful signal in it's own right. Or would that be considered gaming the votes?
Agreed, I'm surprised the 4x price increase is not mentioned more often. Personally I can understand moving away from a free offering, especially if they're having trouble with spammers, but to quadruple pricing out of the blue? For sites, like mine, built around a huge amount of transactional email (scheduling group gaming sessions and notifying your group by email), a 4x increase is essentially no different than just shutting down. They have their reasons, and now I have mine, to never use a mailchimp product again.
To add more data, I've been successful (generating more than average salary in my area for programmers I think) in creating a small online saas business. I would say it's totally possible, but for me it took a lot longer than I think most people realize (4-5 years) from the beginning, where I had no programming knowledge whatsoever, to where I'm at now. I had to continue working my regular job and slowly transition into it.
Also I have a few other friends with similar bootstrapped businesses, and I can say I've never actually met anyone with true "passive income". I really enjoy the freedom and flexibility I have, but if I stopped working on my business it would eventually shrivel and die. Competition is fierce, and I'm in a commodity type business (basically online marketing/ websites for realtors) with several huge competitors and hundreds of smaller ones, so I'm continually trying to improve the software/ product.
I'm not in it to generate passive income, and I think starting with that goal in mind could be frustrating because as others have said, most passive income preachers secretly do a ton of work (think of how hard tim ferris actually works, every single day). I'd reiterate what others have already said, just treat it like learning to program, realize it's going to take a long time, and steadily improve on it. The goal for me is freedom to do or make what I want, flexibility, financial security, and to have my efforts tied directly to my success.
Agreed. I don't want to sound totally callous, but while this is a dramatic and terrible incident in it's own right, her writing style does seem to be magnifying the drama for maximum effect/ attention, in which case it's a truly difficult problem for AirBnb to solve. Even handing her a big sack of cash/ new apartment (just an example, not recommending that course) would probably just lead to an expose blog post about how they tried to buy her silence. How do you satisfy someone if a large part of what they want is attention? Create a new security policy and name it after her?
A good article, but personally I'm concerned that your "safe picks" such as government bonds/ sovereign debt might be exactly the kind of black swan Taleb is talking about. He doesn't seem to be such a fan on US monetary policy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyHnPkXZYNI
To my untrained eyes, it makes the idea of diversifying into anything other than the US dollar seem like a good idea. But to be honest my understanding of the US monetary system gets fuzzier the more I learn about it.
Not claiming to be more intelligent, but my take on your question is:
Just as price is a function of supply and demand, so are exchange rates. The money supply is independent of the price of goods and of the price of currencies (exchange rates).
Seemingly, a larger overall quantity of dollars in existence would seem to predict a decline in the value of the dollar relative to other currencies, but the monetary policy decisions that resulted in increased money supply are intended to achieve relative price stability.
For example, the dollars introduced to the economy and lent to banks had the effect of encouraging banks to make loans, which helped increase demand for products and services, which helped prevent prices from falling.
Also, many of the dollars are being used as reserve capital after the market price of various securities which had been used as reserve capital declined, leaving the entities under-capitalized. All this was done in an attempt to keep interest rates low (in effect a price target) and prevent banks from being forced to stop lending money...
So I think the bottom line is that the behavior of consumers and firms can account for so much variability in supply and demand that the money supply can expand greatly and prices can still say roughly constant... the other side of the coin being that monetary policy was used to keep prices relatively stable, in this case by keeping the credit infrastructure status quo alive.
edit: Of course, if the Fed gets it wrong or lacks the will to raise interest rates when necessary, hyperinflation can result, which would impact exchange rates.
If you read further down, it seems to show that the banking system as a whole can expand $100 into $1000 with a 10% reserve requirement:
"Reserve requirements affect the potential of the banking system to create transaction deposits. If the reserve requirement is 10%, for example, a bank that receives a $100 deposit may lend out $90 of that deposit. If the borrower then writes a check to someone who deposits the $90, the bank receiving that deposit can lend out $81. As the process continues, the banking system can expand the change in excess reserves of $90 into a maximum of $1,000 of money ($100+$90+81+$72.90+...=$1,000), e.g.$100/0.10=$1,000."
it's just saying that money+loans IGNORING DEBTS instead of subtracting debts can be a multiple of money. if in addition to adding loans u also subtract debts then you'll find nothing happened.
Open to any and all feedback - getting people on the internet to do anything at all is insanely hard, but could be the best chance we have bots, false info and astroturfing.