Bitcoin transactions take hours to confirm now, making Bitcoin useless as a transactional medium. When people are paying 25%, 50%, and more to send Bitcoin of typical levels of purchase, it's time to get out. Stripe is honestly a bit late in dropping Bitcoin for transactions.
> As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline.
You say this as if a large-scale, mainstream switch to a decentralized currency is right around the corner. With how volatile the market has been, what makes you think a switch like this is even remotely near-term?
It's so obvious, I'm just going to use a decentralized cryptocurrency to hail my self-driving electric car in like five years, so why bother supporting legacy technologies? /s
I run a midsize ecommerce site and, from where I'm sitting, Stripe looks at least as essential in a crypto economy as they are now.
We don't want to handle the mechanics of refunds. We don't want to handle the mechanics of disputes. We don't want to get scammed because we screwed up some small detail of our payment layer. We certainly don't want to do our internal accounting in more than one currency, crypto or otherwise. We're a tech company, not a financial services firm.
From our perspective trusting a third party is a feature not a bug. It means less work for us and less surface area that we could conceivably screw up, and I for one am happy to pay a small premium for the extra insulation.
I worry about getting screwed over by any of a dozen vendors, including but not limited to our payment processor. I also worry about getting scammed, about losing all our money due to a bug, about costly human errors, and about getting priced out of the market by competitors who take shortcuts I'm not willing to.
On balance, we feel that the benefits of sitting behind a payment processor outweigh the drawbacks. Our trust isn't absolute, but we feel the risk of trusting a third party is smaller than the risk we would have to incur by not trusting a third party.
You probably should've checked https://www.google.fi/search?q=bitcoin+destroyed+my+business before posting that, considering there's twice as many results as the other two combined. Not to mention things like entire exchanges evaporating...
> Not a single link on the first page relates to actual business getting destroyed.
I see one about Purse.io, but OK.
> Also, amount of google searches does not mean much.
Then what are your Google search links intended to convey? That people occasionally have issues with PayPal/Amazon and blame them for the loss of their business? Sure, there'll always be some of those - and some will be failed businesses looking for someone else to blame. I'm sure there are some legit issues to find in those searches, but it's pretty easy to find stories like Mt. Gox to demonstrate that both sets of platforms have their issues.
“However, Aboulafia noted, such a capability could also be considered a destabilizing development if a U.S. adversary decided to react preemptively to such an aircraft’s existence.”
In other words China and Russia may contemplate fighting WW3 now rather than waiting to be leap frogged. Fun.
Similar to Russia. The increasing gap there of course is that Russia can't keep up with the US and China on investment, they're going to increasingly fall behind except in a few isolated segments of defense tech. Russia is becoming a second tier military power, if they're not already (that is, closer to Germany, India, France etc. than the US and China).
The US and China are now spending $1+ trillion per year on their militaries. The combined sum will likely eclipse the entire value of Russia's annual economic output in the next 15-20 years.
Is it just a budget game, though? How efficient is each country with their budget?
US spending one trillion dollars, and China spending one trillion dollars, it doesn't guarantee that they will be technologically matched.
It does not have to be symmetric. You only have to spend as much as you need to nullify an adversary's capability. Ex, one does not need to manufacture an aircraft carrier to counter one, you just need to take it out of action.
Oracle is downright evil in the most corporate way. No one with other options should be a customer or employee. Oracle needs to die with Comcast and the rest.
And what makes you think, that what comes after (there will sureley be a company that fills the void) would be better in any way? The problem is not so much the frivolous lawsuits of oracle and the likes, but the incentives to pursue this behavior.
Huel just came to the US. I haven't tried Soylent, but I have to say I really love Huel. Keeps me full, no stomach issues, the vanilla just tastes like lightly sweetened oatmeal.
Plus it's vegan, gluten-free, non-gmo, low fodmap, etc etc. You'd have to try REALLY hard to find a stomach condition that wouldn't allow Huel.
I have a bag of Huel in my kitchen gathering dust because I just couldn't get past the consistency of it(the little chunks of oats or whatever). Also the name reminds me of "Human Gruel" meanwhile everyone I say it to immediately thinks "Human Fuel", which I think is amusing. I guess my brain burned the connection to those two words after trying the stuff for a couple weeks!
I actually don't mind the chunks, but I am probably the least picky eater I know. That said, I have gotten to the point where I can mix it to a fairly uniform consistency (just shaking a lot and doing the right ratios of liquid to powder) so maybe it just takes practice.
I think the chunks definitely help with being able to feel very full after drinking it. Maybe I'm just not letting it mix/soften well enough before going for it. I'll do more experimenting!
Microsoft hires thousands of H1B workers for generic roles like project manager and software developer.
Do you really think there aren’t Americans that could fill those roles? Of course there are but it would cost more. A true shortage would not affect Microsoft at all. They have as much money as anyone.
This is a dirty secret of tech that you can’t discuss without being labeled racist or xenophobic no matter how untrue that is.
I have hired a few H1-Bs, and here is how the first step goes:
Before you file for a H1-B visa with USCIS, employer needs to get Department of Labor (DOL) certification. Employers have to advertise the job in local media for 30 days. Jobs have to offer median salary for the given skill based on DOL numbers (Roughly $104K per year).
All resumes received, and interview notes must be included in DOL application for labor certification. If a qualified American applied for the job, DOL rejects the certification request.
I would love to hear where you see a material flaw in this process. To me it signifies there is a real talent shortage.
Here is the flaw, material or otherwise:
(a) companies post jobs with descriptions that filter out all but the candidate they are filing for DOL certification. Next time, look at your company postings with exacting requirements: 3 yrs of experience in the stack A, 5 years in the language X, 6 years in Y, etc. That's how the game is played.
(b) During green card processing, I have seen companies setting up fake interviews only to disqualify whoever comes for the interview. I was a victim of that.
I have seen pretty much every company be guilty of (a), so it is hard to regulate it away.
(b) seems downright malicious and/or stupid. Why conduct fake interviews if employer is going to pay the same amount? Especially when you future foreign worker won't be able to work for you till next October at the earliest?
(b) is to file I-140 for those who have been already on H1B. If I were an employer, and if I wanna apply for I-140 for one of my employees who is on H1B, I need to do that.
I don't think you understand what the word "shortage" means. A shortage logically cannot persist in a free market unless some external factor is artificially constraining supply or restricting prices. There is no supply constraint; unlike physicians or lawyers there is no formal training or certification required for software developers (outside of a few secret or safety-critical positions). And the government hasn't placed any limits on salaries. If there was a true shortage then we would be seeing huge increases in compensation, which obviously isn't happening. Perhaps you're just not willing to pay the market clearing price.
> Employers have to advertise the job in local media for 30 days
So like, newspapers nobody reads? A website you really hope nobody finds? There's a wide variety of strategies to claim you found no applicants. Don't have to take my word for it, consultants at Cohen & Grigsby go in far more detail: https://web.archive.org/web/20150725212924/http://www.ethics...
I have worked at companies in the past that actively rejected all applicants (Americans included) to the job postings, even if they were qualified. These were entry/mid-level PM and software engineering positions.
> Employers have to advertise the job in local media for 30 days.
Are you sure? It's only true if by "local media" you literally mean a piece of paper on a board in the break room.
>All resumes received, and interview notes must be included in DOL application for labor certification.
You are definitely confusing PERM with H1B. PERM (certification for EBGC) requires advertising, interviewing and is, essentially, a process of proving that there are no Citizens or Resident Aliens willing to take the job. For H1B DOL just certifies that the wages you are paying are adequate for the position. Plus there is a requirement to inform your own employees about the H1Bs, which is done by positing these jobs in "local media" (in one company I've seen those posted in a closet, which also contained a soda machine so it had some foot traffic).
This is not really true: the main limiting factor with H1-B visas is the yearly cap; as others have said, the rest of the requirements are normally easy to check off (especially if you already have an H1-B).
Since you are not subject to the H1-B cap when reapplying if you are already on an H1-B, and since there is so much demand for tech jobs, it's not clear that H1-B tech workers have to be loyal to their employer.
> Do you really think there aren’t Americans that could fill those roles?
Would they fill them at a similar level of quality? That is to say, if you forced similar wages on both and removed the cost of bringing someone from overseas into the country, would the employer hire the foreigner? If so, I see the visa programme as fulfilling one of its roles: adding to the American braintrust. If not, you have a point.
Most studies I've seen don't attempt to answer this question, instead devolving to the easier-to-answer if useless "could they have found an American who met the job requirements".
> Would they fill them at a similar level of quality? That is to say, if you forced similar wages on both
Forcing certain wages on American workers is not the way that H1B is intended to work which is basically the point here. H1B is ostensibly intended to allow employers to fulfill roles that cannot be filled at any salary by US workers.
If anything, coders aren't the ones who are under paid in US. Their salary are HIGH.
To be the devil's advocate, the H1B visa is created specifically for the purpose to bring down the cost of employers, by opening up to global talent supply, no matter under what disguise. And software industry seems to me is exactly the sector what H1B is intended to apply on.
And I do think it is misleading to say programmers' salary is not high because of the cost-of-living. Cost-of-living applies on EVERYONE, there are many waiters/drivers/artists living in SF, and I don't believe they get additional rebate because they are not doing computer work.
> Do you really think there aren’t Americans that could fill those roles? Of course there are but it would cost more.
"Shortage" means that even if you pay insane salaries, you will not get a qualified employee. Thus a thought: make it a requirement for H1B workers that they are paid, say, 3 times what the average of a typical salary for a related job is. This way companies can solve their shortages via H1B, but they will only do it to stop shortages of qualified workers (for an insane price) and not to reduce costs.
By your definition, is it ever possible to have a labor shortage? As long as there's one qualified individual who doesn't already work for you, there should be some "insane salary" that would entice them, no?
> By your definition, is it ever possible to have a labor shortage?
Yes, it is quite possible, though not common. Centrally jobs, where you need highly intelligent people with qualifications that only very few have (and are insanely hard to get) or an insane amount of experience.
Think of people with decades of experience developing chip architectures from ground up (example: Jim Keller).
Think of willing to apply mathematicians of Field-medalist quality to work on your insanely hard problems (example: Microsoft Research (Station Q) applied Michael Freedman to work on the mathematical foundation for topological quantum computers; or it is well-known that Terence Tao also does consulting work for the NSA (source: http://www.smh.com.au/good-weekend/terence-tao-the-mozart-of... )).
Or think of gurus in AI/machine learning of an above-ordinary-human level of competence.
But I am aware of companies that actually do have this kind of problem (not in the extreme of my previous post, where I exaggerated my point somewhat to make it more marked):
They are looking for some kinds of people with some very specific and rare qualifications who are rare and hard to find and if they really do find such people, they of course pay such people really well. In other words: Their problem really is finding such people and not the money.
So in this case there is a shortage of people and not of money.
I feel that hard to believe, if anything, I would say foreign workers are more expensive than local talent, in big tech firms they are paid just the same as Americans, but they come with added expenses due to international relocation, visa feeds, etc.
* I might be biased thou, since I work on the US under a work Visa.
"Jobs that Americans could fill" is not what people are talking about when they talk about H1B abuse.
H1B abuse is when you do things like pay people the minimum salary as required by law, and THEN set up some illegal contract with the employee that says that if you leave before 2 years, the engineer has to pay back 10s of thousands of dollars.
Or another common thing that happens is that the same company will submit a person multiple times through shell companies, so that the person has an unfair advantage in the lottery.
> THEN set up some illegal contract with the employee that says that if you leave before 2 years, the engineer has to pay back 10s of thousands of dollars
is true, and VERY prevelant with Indian 'Companies' [called 'Bodyshoppers'] that abuse the H1B visa program. Some even hold your passport hostage (which is also VERY ILLEGAL). Again, speaking from personal experience of some of my Indian friends who came here on H1B around the same time as me...
For international companies either they import overseas skilled employees to their headquarters (e.g Microsoft) and/or they open up offices in other countries where those skilled employees can work(e.g Google).
There's a pretty good argument for the US to import those skilled employees rather than export those jobs. But as a non US citizen, I'd be more than happy for H1B workers to be more restricted and have more big tech companies open offices in my country.
In addition to technical skills, there are other considerations:
1. Diversity.
2. Cultural fit.
3. Results.
Companies know better what they want/need -- not some loud random strangers on the internet, and definitely not the government/USCIS.
That said, driving down US wages should definitely be punished as it is illegal.
> Do you really think there aren’t Americans that could fill those roles
The onus is on you (or an authority) to show that that they ignored Americans. I'm sure they could hire a person of any nationality to put a body on the seat, but probably not someone who could solve their whiteboard problems. I'm especially biased about MS because I failed to clear their interview twice.
I downvoted your other comment about Google (that's now dead) because I thought you were making nonsensical claims with zero evidence; I don't think your comments were racist or xenophobic.
Congrats on getting to the interview phase. I've heard horror stories of Microsoft interview process and reluctant to go through their interview meat grinder.
If I remember correctly, the initial phone screen was a joke. They literally just asked me to code fibonacci once, and something similar the other time. All the interviewers themselves were nice to me, etc.
Best interview experience I've ever had. They had me do a quick online thing then come to an event with a bunch of people. No waiting around for weeks between each stage, no multiple phone screens, no waiting for weeks after for a yes/no.
Ha, I'd have to get a golden parachute to work there. Some SJW googler would try to scalp me within 30 minutes of me saying the problem with policing in America is the lack of secret police. And the problem with airport security is that it's reluctant to embrace differential scrutiny.
It's often hard to split work between countries effectively (especially in large corporations). A lot of the larger & more impactful projects tend to be done at a home base - for political or logistical reasons.
I don't know which part of Amazon you worked for - but this was totally done in Amazon: We had/have major pieces of kindle, aws, payments et. built out of India. I worked for one of those teams for two years. Amazon is so big that segmenting like this isn't a big deal at all.
I am all for shutting the door on under-qualified engineers being hired just because they will work for much lower wages, But applying the same rule to companies like Amazon / Microsoft etc would just mean work moves to those offices.
Personally I moved here because the team I wanted to work for was here (DynamoDB - given my history building storage engines before). I stayed because of the quality of life / opportunities. I mean if my visa gets revoked, I would sell my house etc here, pick up my money and probably end up in Canada / Europe offices of Snap anyway.
I try not to attach myself to material stuff too much, I'd like to think I can make the best out of wherever I am, improve when I can. But not many (including my family) are like that. They like the security provided by a good immigration policy - means this will only take high paying jobs away from here.
The flaw here is using the wrong metrics. Once a company has found a repeatable and growing business model, it’s trivial to raise money and there’s no reason to pick Social Capital over anyone else.
The big market opportunity is to fund startups at the very earliest signs of success. When all they have to show is some code and a few Hacker News upvotes or GitHub stars.
Someone is going to make YCs returns look weak by funding this early. And nothing would do more for diversity than a low barrier test that is 100% blind and meritocratic.
From my experience, most of it is about connections. I have seen $41 MM thrown at startups like Color and them failing a month later! Why just recently, FileCoin raised tens of millions from VCs, before goong on to raise $200 MM from crypto holders around the world for a product that hasn't even been developed, in a space where MaidSafe and IPFS etc. already exist. How? Because it was touted by CoinList, started by among others AngelList founder Naval Ravikant who has all the connections.
Filecoin is made by the people who made IPFS, and it is an incentivization system for IPFS. Maidsafe has been around for more than 10 years and has yet to launch, and it’s unclear what exactly it does and if it even competes with Filecoin at all.
Filecoin vc deal was the best imho executed vc play I have seen in a while. for 50m with a discount they were able to sell approx 200m to coin buyers. This not only offset their risk but literally gave the x4 in raw cash infusion in 2 weeks, growing the valuation without any time and this was done all on vc reputation/ name recognition/ and hype building. Very well done...
Social metrics. Would make the Social Capital name genuinely meaningful :-)
The “social response” (HN, GitHub, reddit, ...) to a new project, product, or service is all you should need to predict success at a high enough rate to do extremely well.
It’s not a matter of difficulty so much as conviction and intelligence.
This makes sense for a company that has every incentive to prolong a move away from credit cards.
As soon as we switch to a decentralized “currency” stripes business will begin its decline.