The Apple card is the only credit card in the US (that I know of) which does not resell your granular transaction data to 3rd party brokers. To me that alone makes it tremendously better than existing cards.
Yes I'm sure Apple Card data is included in that dataset. That isn't the point.
> And even if it's not, as long as the other side (i.e. merchants and acquirers) just collects and aggregates the same data, that's little consolation.
Respectfully disagree on this point. The issue isn't leaking anonymized aggregated data. The issue is, for example, Chase can and does personalize rewards ads based on your exact transactions internally. So when you use any Chase card, every Chase related entity has access to your non-anonymized transaction data for marketing and credit decisioning purposes.
I will cautiously watch how Apple handles this issue in the future because I don't trust Chase and my financial privacy is important to me.
While unemployment rate is relatively low this measure masks deeper problems felt by those working to try and make a living.
Specifically, labor participation is near an all-time low so discouraged workers, who aren’t counted in unemployment numbers, are excluded.
Also, there has been a marked and ongoing shift from full-time jobs with benefits to part-time, casual, and gig work.
Finally, the widely cited consumer price index is a very politicized and skewed measure of the true inflation facing consumers. It ignores the real cost of home ownership via owner equivalent rent measures. It uses a process called substitution to replace suddenly expensive goods with cheaper goods. It includes arbitrary adjustments for improved quality of goods that aren’t always perceived by purchasers who only see the higher prices and these adjustments only work in one direction to skew CPI lower. That’s why consumers often perceive inflation to be higher than the CPI measure.
Economists look at inflation on a month/month or year/year basis. This is not an accident as it purposely ignores the destructive cumulative effect of inflation.
Individuals, by contrast look at the cumulative effect of inflation. If inflation runs hot for several years and then comes back to a moderate level, prices don’t go down regardless of what economists would have you believe. The effect of inflation has memory.
Economists look at inflation in many, many ways. I don't think anyone that's reasonably well informed, especially economists, misunderstands the cumulative impact of price changes.
Economists that make monetary policy decisions look at recent inflation trends + projected inflation because they are tasked with price stability, which requires them to often respond to shocks well outside their control (war in Ukraine, massive government spending, tax cuts, covid-19 pandemic, etc.)
I was trading and researching fixed income and inflation markets (and implementing in multi-billion dollar portfolios) years ago when you had inflationistas claiming the Fed was going to cause double digit runaway inflation. At the same time, you had people claiming the Fed was not doing enough to support markets.
No matter what monetary policy makers do, it will be pretty much universally mocked by pundits and especially anyone that wants to talk their own book.
Academic economists don't really focus much on any particular reading of inflation, unless perhaps they have their own axe to grind about how it is measured or responded to.
Monetary policy can't change the past, which is why they evaluate current and expected inflation, not what happened in two years ago. Just because prices increased dramatically in 2022 does not mean the Fed or any other central bank should aim for deflation.
If you’re discounting a rigorous and well-referenced critique solely because it’s on a “spamtaculous” cite, then my intuition is that either you’re a motivated reasoner and nothing would push you off your position, or your epistemic framework for deciding what is credible and what isn’t is so wild that trying to discuss this issue with you would be like trying to teach French to a dolphin.
Just read the critique, ignore whatever “spamtaculous” things you’re seeing on the site. The content of the review is what we should care about. Happy to discuss that.
- I believe he can launch rockets into space and land them on their own footprint.
- I believe he can revolutionize auto manufacturing and disrupt a 100 year old industry replacing fossil-fuel burning dinosaurs with clean electric vehicles that outperform them and that appeal to the general public
- I believe he can allow quadrapelegics to interact with the world in ways never thought possible
- I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times
- I believe that innovation is hard and just because he boldly claims he is going to Mars or make cars drive themselves - and hasn’t done it yet, is no reason to discount the possibility that he might actually pull it off one day
Mostly I agree, modulo "he knows how to make teams to do XYZ", which I'm happy to count for the same reason I'm happy to blame him personally when those teams he's ordering around do something I don't like:
> I believe he can, to a great degree, restore free speech on social media even if it is messy and imperfect at times
I strongly disagree with this.
Even if I ignore the proxy of all the investors writing off their buy-out loans by 75%, even if I ignore that when people link me to random threads I can only see the specific one linked and not any reply because of an invisible paywall^w account-wall, even if I ignore that loading a random tweet now often takes 26 seconds or more (yes, I did just record my screen to get that number), even if I ignore that undesirable stories can be buried by an avalanche of alternative narratives and not just by censoring the truth…
There's still the problem of Musk intervening politically in ways that, although totally legal, are exactly the kind of thing he was complaining about before the takeover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
I'd like someone, eg Musk, to define "free speech". Start with some of those "first principles" he likes so much.
Then, per "theory vs reality" cliché, I'd like someone, eg Musk, to explain or demonstrate or larp or interpretative dance what "free speech" looks like in practice. Maybe even point to an existing example.
For bonus credit:
- explain relationship between "free speech" and news feeds (algorithmic hate machines)
- explain operation of "free speech" multinationally
- explain how to balance "free speech" and moderation
- enumerate the tradeoffs of, downsides due to, and consequences of "free speech"
ElonJet was a live geotracking site for private jets. You can post cisgender, it just comes with a warning.
Before, people were being banned for using "him" instead of "her" to describe biological males who self-identified as women. People were secretly de-amplified for criticizing the government policy of lockdowns. It was censorship on a whole different magnitude.
Two wrongs don’t make a right. Either you’re a “free speech absolutist” or you’re just a lying charlatan. Elon is clearly the latter, the evidence is right in front of your eyes and you choose to make excuses.
ElonJet is posting publicly available information and isn’t banned on other platforms. Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.
> Something coming with a warning is the same as restricting speech.
Placing a warning is generally not considered a restriction on free speech but rather a tool to inform or protect audiences.
In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright. Warnings are typically seen as a way to balance free expression with the responsibility to inform audiences.
> In contrast, restricting free speech involves preventing someone from expressing their views or censoring content outright.
You mean like suing people for saying true things, and encouraging the government to criminally investigate for people for saying the same? Because that is exactly what Musk has done in the past year.
The warnings undoubtedly come with a derank in the Twitter algorithm, so it's very much not the same.
But if you want to get really technical then this isn't even about "free speech". A platform restricting speech has nothing to do with "free speech" as it is defined in the US constitution. That's all about governments creating laws that punish people for certain speech.
But hey, we're in a world where Elon spouts nonsense about being all about "free speech" so the world has lost that meaning anyway.
People are only being banned for impersonation and live geotracking. In the previous Twitter, you were banned, shadow-banned, de-amplified, etc, if you expressed views that the political left disagreed with.
You want to justify and downplay the latter my presenting Musk as equally villainous. It's disingenuous mental gymnastics to advance your censorious and authoritarian agenda. Getting Twitter back to being censored is what motivates the incessant attacks on Musk.
Let’s say you’re right. There is only one side claiming they are “free speech absolutists”. There is only one side demonstrably lying to you. It’s Elon Musk. You’re being duped by a billionaire and you’re too blind to see it.
I'd much rather X under Musk while he doesn't live up to his free speech absolutist claims than X under the establishment, where you must use left-wing gender pronoun conventions or be banned.
You're okay with the previous authoritarianism that was imposed that's why you'd prefer a return to the previous setup. If you believed in political neutrality and Free Speech, you would be hardly annoyed by Musk not being as committee to Free Speech as he claims, while he reverses what had been an overwhelming censorship program.
> HE can do nothing of the sort because he is an idiot with very few real skills.
Management is a real skill. Salesmanship is also a real skill. I may not approve of the showboating, but drumming up enthusiasm for a future that most consider to be fantasy, was a necessary (though not sufficient) part of building an electric car company in an era when most people thought hydrogen was the future and that "electric car" meant "a milk float" and, if they had memories of any real personal electric vehicle, those memories would have been of the failure of the Sinclair C5:
Pretty sure nobody except Toyota thought hydrogen was going to be a useful intermediate fuel: handling is ridiculously difficult compared to room-temperature liquids, energy density is ridiculously low.
It would have made more sense to sell Fischer-Tropsch synthesized carbon fuel from purpose-grown crops, at a mere 3x the current production price of fossil carbon fuels, using the existing infrastructure for distribution into existing vehicles.
I don’t like the guy but he’s built companies that are implanting brain chips to give people vision and parapalegics the ability to interact in the world, has blanketed the globe in true high speed internet, have built spaceships that launch more frequently than any nation has ever done their own. And then there’s the EV thing which many see as key to fighting climate change. If he wasn’t so unlikable and part of this twitter debacle, the world would be praising each of these efforts.
Most of the passionate (embittered? salty? flavourless?) critiques of Elon always sound like a confession: His critics can't explain why he is successful, why his companies are successful, nor why he is wealthy. When they attempt an explanation, it's less an explanation and more a dismissal: luck, other people, teams, theft, subsidies, corruption, "the system is broken!", a technoaccelerationist cabal secretly pulling the levers of power.
But, fundamentally, the question whose answer eludes the majority of humans especially Elon's critics is: Why am I not as wealthy and relevant as Elon yet I'm obviously smarter and more ethical than he is? (Their implicit answer is that "life is unfair and doesn't reward the best people.")
Because if any of his critics actually had a meaningful critique that corresponds to reality, they would simply build better products and companies, become billionaires themselves and exemplify rather than pontificate about a better mode of billionaire behaviour and grandeur of vision.
I wonder if Musk fans realize that constantly deflecting all criticism with "you're just jealous, bro" says more about them than about the people they're limply trying to discredit.
> I wonder if Musk fans realize that constantly deflecting all criticism with "you're just jealous, bro" says more about them than about the people they're limply trying to discredit.
I wonder if the critics of Musk's "fans" realize that deflecting all criticism with "they're just Musk fans, bro" says more about their own anemic ability to imagine the legitimacy of another perspective, their utter lack of humility and complete poverty of intellectual honesty, than about the so-called fans they're flaccidly trying to discredit?
Any day now a Tesla Semi truck will stop by to deliver my solar shingles. I can then use them to charge my Tesla robotaxi. My Robotaxi will ferry people around when I'm not using it and pay for itself in under 2 years. Then I can start saving for my ticket to Mars, where I'll be safe from the woke mind virus that is consuming everyone here on earth.
I don't think the argument is that everything he touches turns to gold. Transforming two industries and going from in debt to the planet's richest is an achievement in itself.
I do recognise his major contributions: Made electric cars commonplace sooner than I thought with the Model S, financed SpaceX's doubtlessly awesome progress, and... well that's pretty much it.
Thing is, the illusion is fading, his previously "inscrutable" politics are on his sleeve, and you can't just pretend he's not a complete liability for any company because of his irrational, and frankly childish, behaviour.
> Made electric cars commonplace sooner than I thought with the Model S
You mean financing and leading the largest EV maker in the world and fundamentally changing a 100 year old industry.
Car industry has been considered for a long time a incredibly hard place to get into for a startup. Most new companies happened when industrial powers rose and supported local companies.
There are decades of failed car companies. And at the same time as Tesla, there were other companies who promised EV revolutions and failed.
People point to the Model S, but the Model 3 was actually just as or more important. When the Model 3 showed profitability ever car company in the world massively increased their investment in EV, before that many companies were pretending and doing research. For years the story was EV can't be profitable below 50k and you can't build them at volume.
> financed SpaceX's doubtlessly awesome progress
If with 'finacned' you mean founded and lead the largest SpaceX company in the world that has revolutionized the whole space industry and is the biggest rocket company and the biggest sat company that can also fly people to space and build the biggest rocket in the history of humanity.
SpaceX Starlink literally fundamentally changed the largest war in Europe since WW2.
But I guess all he did is 'financed progress'. You got to be fucking kidding me.
> and you can't just pretend he's not a complete liability
Can you spell out in actual real terms what this means? SpaceX is going from success to success and has been for 25 years now. Tesla is still a large company doing pretty well. Both companies are much bigger and much more important and powerful then they were 4 years ago.
In the real world, customers don't care about 'childish' behavior. And claiming he is irrational when his companies mostly act rationally on net (no companies is perfect and never makes errors) also don't really work very well.
The only reason you consider him a liability is that he opposes far-left ideology and promotes free speech. If that makes you a liability then I want every business leader to become a liability.
At the very least, if you are going to impartially assess his business accomplishments, you should completely disregard his political views when making that assessment. Otherwise you're giving him a dishonest business leadership assessment as a ploy to punish him for his politics.
That's the reason he was able to get this rich with SpaceX and not stall sooner — most of the other space companies were (and in the west, still are) busy scratching backs rather than developing successful products.
It's possible that Tesla, which Musk didn't found, would have given us an EV by another name. Rivan also got us an electric truck before the cybertruck came out. Fisker's not doing so well though.
Possible sure - just as it is possible my next startup could be the next Tesla. In reality, when Elon joined Tesla they had nothing but early concept prototypes of a high-end sports car with the name Roadster. Elon took it from concept, to launch, to production. Then he did the same with the Model S/X/3, sold 5 million electric vehicles, made them so compelling that it completely disrupted the ICE vehicle market and sparked a gold rush of elecrification in the car industry resulting in a Trillion-dollar company.
It's possible "which Musk didn't found" is doing some heavy lifting in your statement above.
Reading HN threads ranting about “manbabies” when referring to arguably the single greatest innovator and entrepreneur of our time was not on my bingo card on a site purporting to promote innovation and entrepreneurship.
So, going back on topic, how is the robotaxi business going, that Musk promised you could start 2020? His success relies on delusional people believing his bs. No amount of real world facts will convince his followers he was wrong, as you just publicly displayed.
Amd this is why there are no mid-sized family businesses remaining in Canada, except for the occasional farm. Billionaire oligopolies are all that remain as only they are sustainable in the tax farm once known as the great white north.
I come from a province that is wholly owned by a billionaire family. They own all industry, all media, and basically every (barely) living wage job outside the government. Look up the Irving family.
Billionaires may not be a uniquely Canadian problem, but the lack of a wealthy middle of entrepreneurs and reasonably wealthy individuals is uniquely Canadian.
Canadians cheer at taxing the rich and as a result end up with a “middle-class” that is barely getting by, a billionaire class that rules the Kingdom, and nothing in between.
Canada is designed to support Oligopolies. It does so in the media, food distribution, telecom, insurance, banking and virtually every industry in the country. This is an intentional policy decision of punishing entrepreneurs and pushing us out of the country. Look at the recent wealth taxes and the national response to them as an example.
Article from mcgill.ca brings you clickbait - read this article and be outraged! Science journalism.
Makes three major claims:
- AG1 is a very popular supplement powder used to make a one-a-day smoothie filled with 75 ingredients [True]
- The vitamins and minerals it contains are based on the idea that the average person doesn’t get enough of these nutrients through their diet, which contradicts scientific evidence [Maybe True, but claimed without evidence]
- AG1 also contains a digestive enzyme, adaptogens, and probiotics, despite the fact that there is no robust evidence that they offer benefits to humans [Proveably false, there is plenty of evidence for the benefits of these ingredients]
Famously the institution selling you this scary headline is the same one that brought you the CIA's MK Ultra experiments on unsuspecting suspects and never apologized and fought the victims for years.
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