> Step 1: We create a database and use estimated point/mile values found online, such as those provided by The Points Guy. While not ideal, this approach provides a necessary starting point.
If you're going to do this, you could at least cite the source of the values. I'm not seeing that on there.
That said, I find the values from TPG to be absolute junk, applicable only to those who would buy nothing in life but international first class airplane tickets and luxury hotel suites, and it's a disservice to pass them along as fact.
Neovim has a bit of a different mentality compared to Vim; it's not the same project.
I don't really want to discus this in detail here as it's not the right location, but I think lots of people would be interested in continuing Vim, rather than having Vim being subsumed by Neovim. We'll have to see how things and the relationship between Vim and Neovim change and evolve in the coming weeks and months.
I assume there are multiple people willing and able to continue vim development and I think it might be important for that to happen. I just thought it was relevant in the context of that comment to mention the other project.
How many things are there on earth that you can suddenly sell $1 billion worth of, and not lower its price? I never hear this criticism of any other assets even though it applies to virtually all of them.
Social media communities really ought to observe a "leave no trace" rule with respect to GitHub and other such spaces. This commit from February 2022 is now as of today littered with a bunch of joke comments from being linked from here and previously somewhere else earlier (based on timestamps).
I just saw an IG post from a collab between a prominently irreverent burger popup in my town, and one of the most progressive wine bars in the city. It had a security guard kicking out a rowdy woman from a bar.
The comments BLEW UP with people who had never had the burgers or been to the bar calling out the "cop culture" and the celebration of authoritarianism in the photo.
It's a joke at this point, how angry people get at things that have the barest tinge of something to be mad about.
/r/SubredditDrama has had this rule in place from the beginning and it's never been effective. It may be a community norm among the regulars, but the lurkers won't care.
You might enjoy reading ann Atlantic article titled something like “I don’t wanna see you smoking pot”. It is an opinion piece about the importance of community norms.
> I received a huge amount of pushback for my remark (in addition to quite a lot of agreement), much of it premised on the idea that any social response to public weed smell would inevitably result in the warehousing of Black and brown bodies. In fact, I don’t want the police to put public weed-smokers in jail. I simply think New Yorkers should do a better job of policing themselves: a middle ground in which smokers of any color exercise discretion where the law employs restraint.
> Tolerance is a wonderful value in principle. And as the intolerant have long understood, it is also a value that can be easily exploited. It works best when buttressed by agreed-upon standards and a common investment in informal norms...
> The reflex to dismiss any criticism of violations against communal consideration exemplifies an evolving progressive politics, what the writer Michael Shellenberger has referred to as an ethos of “left-libertarianism.” In ways large and small, it has degraded urban spaces....
> When is the last time you’ve seen someone pounding shots of vodka on the subway? You haven’t, and for good reason. Drug possession was once a crime as well as a taboo. Now that we’ve optimized the admirable goal of ensuring that it isn’t the former, we need a redirect to preserve the latter.
Sadly this is not true. Wright was ruled to have won the case but had the damage award reduced to only 1 pound.[1] (Wright is being bankrolled by billionaire Calvin Ayre. They are not worried about the money here.)
How someone can win a case while found to have "advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial" just goes to show how utterly deranged the British legal system is. As long as it is such, scammers like Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre will continue to torment innocent people.
It's more complicated than that, as the judgement wrote:
> looking at the “big picture”, Dr Wright was awarded only nominal damages, so Mr McCormack is the successful party, as were the defendants in Joseph v Spiller and FlyMeNow,
...and the court awarded McCormack his costs for the trial on an indemnity basis-- which still doesn't cover his time lost and stress due to this, but it's about as good as you can get as a defendant. EXCEPT, in the interest in finality the court declined to reverse a ruling from an earlier stage of the trial that awarded Wright his costs, and Wright has now delivered his bill of £3.379m, still attempting to deliver on his public promise[*] of ruining McCormack.
So the fact that Wright "won" £1 isn't preventing a somewhat just outcome this case... because the court still rightfully regarded that as a loss for the purpose of awarding costs. The bigger issue is that the UK awards costs incrementally and so has left McCormack potentially paying Wright's inflated costs for his earlier efforts to get the deliberately false case discharged. And, of course, Wright is appealing is his "win" too.
Since Wright himself isn't funding his litigation, this suit was well worth his time in chilling his critics. And it has worked too: it's been difficult to get outlets cover what he's doing, except in the form of repeating both-sideism rendition's of Wright's press releases. I had previously been told outright by a least one journalist at a big publication that they didn't want to print on his claims being falsified because they didn't want to get mired in litigation.
[*] The most recent of which was also breach of a court embargo in the ruling on the case, which Wright was sent up for contempt for ... which had no effect "Faced with a 17,000-word skeleton argument advanced by Wright’s new attorneys, buttressed by 1,600 pages of legal authorities, [The court] concluded that the cost of continuing outweighed the benefits." in other words, he simply DOSed the court and the court dropped it.
Could the deranged British legal system then be turned against those two, with equally vexatious retaliatory lawsuits? Fight fire with fire, as it were.
"never wrestle with a pig – it gets mud all over you and the pig likes it". It would probably be just about as effective as piling cash and a wheelbarrow and lighting it on fire.
For whatever their motivations they already seem to be intentionally racking up their legal bills as high as they possibly can. Some have suggested that since in the UK it's possible for non-attorneys to own firms that this could be used to launder money (Wright's known sponsor spent a decade on a DHS most wanted list for money laundering), though I've seen nothing but speculation. ... whatever the reason they clearly don't mind spending on litigation.
If you win anything they won't pay-- they already have an unpaid judgement against them for ~$140 million dollars in Florida-- their latest gambit in that case has been to announce Wright's wives are actually the plaintiff, that they've fired the plaintiff's attorney and appointed their own. ( Probably a good place to read was the real plaintiff's ultimately unsuccessful motion to strike the fake one's appearance https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.52... the entire docket there is confusing now because you have to scroll to the bottom of each brief to find out if its the real plaintiff or the fake plaintiff).
Wright himself almost certainly couldn't pay-- he has no known source of funding except from extracting money from sponsors via his creator of Bitcoin fiction. Losing cases in and of itself hasn't made him stop or even really slowed him down. Engaging with him in civil court at all is necessary to prevent the personal ruination of his targets, but doesn't seem like a likely path to make him quit.
Historically, In the US ethics rules have mandated a law firm may not be owned by a non-attorney nor have fee sharing agreements with non-attornies. There has been some recent push away from that, but e.g. when they attempted it in California the legislature stepped in: https://www.advocatemagazine.com/article/2022-november/new-c...
Except the fire is not on your side. It's on the money's side. So really, it's just money vs money. Or specifically, YOUR money vs billionaire's money.
Who do you think will win that fight? The fundamental flaw of the court system is that it's biased towards those who have money due to how politics work.
Here's food for thought, why isn't Prince Andrew in any serious trouble regarding the Epstein rapes? I don't know a single citizen who can just put their hand up and say "nope", and walk away without repercussions, unless you know, they're extremely rich. And we see that in the news again and again in every category of crimes.
The system is broken, worldwide. The only true way to fight 'fire with fire' is solidarity. Look at France, fighting together and protesting against raising the pension retirement age. It's been a month and they're still fighting. And for the government to just push that forward without regard to its populace, who do you think that action is actually for? Not the people.
No, I'm saying the only way to actually fight back is not through a system that's already inherently corrupt. You'll never win that fight, you'll just end up losing your hard earned savings.
The only fight worth fighting is one where you stand shoulder to shoulder. The French are doing just that. And even though their government passed the pension age raise, they're still fighting. Because at the end of the day, who did they pass that for? Not for the working class. Look at how fast they got it out without regard to what their citizens were saying.
If you were to fight that in court, not only would you be fighting billionaire funded defense lawyers, but it'll take years and ... ? You see the discrepancy? They're fast to pass laws favorable to billionaires, but for the people? It takes years?
Don't waste money on courts. Real change comes from blood and solidarity. Workers in the past have died for our benefits today.
Why is this an app? It sounds like a nice service but I don't know why I need to install software on my phone and interact with a small touch screen in order to use it.
I don't feel bad about extensively using these rewards cards. If you are a net recipient in this distribution, your participation doesn't directly correlate with any higher participation by any of the victim groups. We simply make it more costly for the bank -- if anything, discouraging them from issuing such cards.
However I do withhold recommending these cards to others because they only make sense for people who don't carry debt or spend recklessly, and I usually cannot be certain that others meet those criteria.
> We simply make it more costly for the bank -- if anything, discouraging them from issuing such cards.
No, you aren't making it more costly for the bank. Banks would be stupid to offer such a setup. The banks pass that cost on to the merchants, who have no choice in the matter.
> No, you aren't making it more costly for the bank.
I sure am; almost all of my spending earns a rewards percentage that exceeds the rate charged to the merchant. (This is not even counting the significant sign-up bonuses.)
Anyone (with good credit) can do the same with a modest amount of research.
The percentage that the bank charges merchants is fixed (for e.g. all Visa credit cards.) If you have a non-rewards Visa credit card, the bank just pockets the entire processing fee. With a rewards credit card, you get some of that fee back.
That's actually not quite true. Depending on the Visa card 'tier' (non-branded, Signature, or Infinite), there are fees that go up. If you have an 'Infinite' card, you're costing a merchant more than if you have a regular unbranded Visa. The difference is really small, like 0.2-0.3% between base and top tier, I think, but there is a difference.
> No, you aren't making it more costly for the bank.
No, you are. Think about it, you as an individual can't change how this system works. But if you use a card with 0% rewards, you're gifting that extra 1-2% to the credit card company. If you use a 2% back card, you're taking that 2% that's on offer away from the bank.
Of course they're still making money, the fees are higher. But they make a tiny bit less if you use the rewards card. So might as well.
Although, yes, banks pass costs to merchants... the thing is, banks do in fact lose money if you are savvy enough with rewards usage/sign up fees/etc. Take a look at the churning forums some time; it would be impossible for banks to actually be making money on this and also pass it along to merchants. The money is coming the ratio of consumers that pay interest (at ~20% or whatever outrageous fee they get) on their credit card bills.
Coinbase has not been a bitcoin company since 2017, when they were on the losing side of a debate on whether the protocol should be modified to support commerce at the expense of decentralization.[0]
Since then they have gone all in on Ethereum and the 10,000 other tokens, encouraging users to try their luck on which one of them will blow up in price like bitcoin did. (Meanwhile they collect trading fees on the way up and/or down.) For them, bitcoin is a legacy product and a thing to say they have to get normies' feet in the door, so they can steer them into daytrading the other tokens.
As a result I am sadly not surprised that they were wholly useless for a person actually trying to buy and use bitcoin. For that I would highly suggest a bitcoin-focused company like Swan, River, Strike, or even CashApp.
> Before Kalshi, markets that allowed you to trade on economically relevant events were illegal or unregulated.
Totally untrue. PredictIt was legal and regulated and well-loved for many years, operating with the permission of the CFTC under a no-action letter. Then Kalshi hired former CFTC commissioner Brian Quintenz and soon, PredictIt was suddenly deemed by the CFTC to have committed still-unenumerated violations of the no-action letter.
This is a rotten way to do business and shame on YC for being involved in it.
Without more detail this just sounds like a conspiracy theory. Hiring a former regulator is way too weak a link to conclude that Kalshi are pulling the strings at the current regulator.
If PI were operating on the basis of a no action letter they were unregulated pretty much by definition. A no action letter is basically a regulator saying that it won't take action against a market participant for doing things that would otherwise merit regulatory action.
(I'm not affiliated with any of these parties, just going by what I read in the comments and the various publications from CFTC.)
Specifically, PredictIt limits positions to $850, while Kalshi limits them to $25,000.
Which is definitely a significant difference, but still seems too small for cases like tmansour’s motivating example (“providing institutions with exposure to, or a hedge against, Brexit”). Though I guess it depends; if you bet $25,000 on a 99:1 long shot, then your position could be worth $2.5 million if it pays off.
(PredictIt also limits each market to 5000 participants, while as far as I can tell Kalshi has no such limit.)
I think it's unfair to jump to the conclusion that Kalshi is to blame for regulators banning PredictIt. From the link you posted, PredictIt promised the regulators they would:
* be small-scale and not-for-profit
* be operated for academic and research purposes only
It doesn't really say what "small-scale" means, but obviously, if PredictIt keeps being successful and growing, eventually they will no longer be small scale. PredictIt was always in a situation where they had to make a different deal with regulators, eventually, as long as they continued to grow.
If you want to blame the CFTC for shutting down PredictIt, Intrade, all of those other prediction markets, then yeah, I agree! I wish they had just been much more permissive long ago. We should blame the CFTC for being too strict. But it doesn't seem fair to blame Kalshi just because they might be the ones to finally convince the regulators to allow one of these.
I hope Kalshi is the group to figure this out, make prediction markets popular, and that prediction markets can finally get the attention from wider society that they deserve.
What a ridiculous regulatory decision. They have to be "small scale?" So it's ok for anybody to do it, but if too many people actually do it, then no one is allowed to anymore.
I went deep doing research on prediction markets a few months ago, and no, it's not an unfair conclusion.
Brian Quintenz is a Republican financial manager who was nominated to be a commissioner of the CFTC by Trump in 2017.[1]
During his time at the CFTC, as I recall, there was heavy bipartisan action, which he was praised for.
Well, there's a slightly more cynical take that he was indeed completely crooked.
My memory is foggy, and I don't have time to grab sources just yet as I have a meeting coming up so I'll update this shortly, but he was then turfed out of the CFTC under Biden and promptly hired by Kalshi.
Given his record, it's less of a jump to see what Kalshi is doing as shady, but more of a smoking gun... PredicIt, which had been operating under a no action letter (NAL) from the CFTC since 2014 just happened to have that letter withdrawn a few months after Kalshi raises $30m at a Series A to take their platform live.[2]
From my point of view, this is classic American lobbying mafia style stuff. Prediction markets have been prevented from flourishing for decades, and now that the time has arrived, the crooked CFTC et al have cleaned the house so their chosen startup that they're deeply in bed with can thrive.
So the guy the administration fired is somehow also the guy to make the current CFTC do what he wants? I’m sure he knows the rules and institutional concerns of the CFTC, but why would he have undue influence over the person who replaced him?
I hear what you're saying, but I feel there is an assumption made by your counter-argument which insinuates that the CFTC is a functional and non-corrupt organization. My perspective, based on my research, seems to suggest otherwise.
Unfortunately, this seems to be endemic of American politics and government organizations.
In Kalshi's case, Brian Quintenz aside, let's talk about Jeff Bandman, who spent close to 3 years at the CFTC.[1] Well, after doing so, he became a regulatory strategy advisor for Kalshi.
Here I quote a Bloomberg article[2] on Kalshi from earlier this year:
"Eventually they tracked down a former CFTC official, Jeff Bandman, who assured them the landscape was changing; he agreed to help them navigate the agency and its characters."
So yeah, I'll concede that there are a few un-generous assumptions that need to be made to fully paint Kalshi as a bad actor in this situation, but given the various pieces of context available, I don't feel it's an overstep to call behavior like this out.
Ultimately Kalshi is set to be a unicorn startup, and I wish the founders success in their endeavors—they appear to be exceptionally bright and hard working individuals—but what appears to have transpired for them to have their shot doesn't sit right with me.
That article is super helpful - my take on it is that the fact Quintenz was a former hedge fund trader probably had a lot more to do with the approval than his later decision to work for Kalshi. And it’s interesting to note he was originally nominated to the CFTC by president Obama
I have no knowledge about this particular case but that is absolutely not how YC operates or thinks about its business. I've never heard a single comment from anyone at YC along such lines. I'm not moderating this subthread the way we normally would*, but IMO you guys should be more scrupulous about posting snarky smears.
Respectfully, I think you should have stopped there, or perhaps earlier. There is quite a body of evidence already provided in this thread suggesting that Kalshi is an anticompetitive regulatory-capture play.
The GP comment was specifically a smear about YC, which is something I do have knowledge about. I don't for a moment believe that YC would invest in "buying out regulators and making competition illegal". That would go against everything I have ever heard, in public or in private, and everything I understand YC to be about.
Just because we moderate HN less when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story does not mean I won't respond like a normal human being.
Regulation in this space is really tough and thorough - we've been battling through it for years now (also explains why this post is coming so long after the end of our batch!).
> If someone from Kalshi wants to swear, in so many words, “We promise we put no effort into convincing CFTC to quash PredictIt”, I will believe them (although I would still suspect the CFTC was following a thought process like “now that Kalshi exists it would be embarrassing to let less-regulated markets exist alongside it”). Until then, I think cui bono remains the right question.
Here's your chance, 'tmansour: if you didn't do anything wrong, why not say so yourself?
I have no horse in this race or involvement with either party at all; I'm just interested because this feels like quite the betrayal of the usual ethos we'd expect from YC affiliation, and your responses on the topic so far are evasive enough to be a red flag in and of themselves.
Maybe not YC -- that's a strange thesis for seed money -- but it wouldn't surprise me if this strategy flowed from Sequoia; not as a primary investment thesis, or even the primary reason for bribing* a former regulator, but rather as a happy side pot payout.
* Yes, the revolving door is bribery-by-any-other-name. Anger at this type of legalized overt corruption of our institutions is literally ripping the country apart.
If you're going to do this, you could at least cite the source of the values. I'm not seeing that on there.
That said, I find the values from TPG to be absolute junk, applicable only to those who would buy nothing in life but international first class airplane tickets and luxury hotel suites, and it's a disservice to pass them along as fact.