The trainers used by many people on Zwift (eg. the Wahoo Kickr) actually read out pretty accurate power numbers.
The classic Peloton is basically a mechanical device with sensors attached - and none of those sensors are a power meter. The power estimates are widely reported to be inaccurate (they exaggerate output to varying degrees). On the other hand, the Kickr precisely modulates resistance and is able to accurately estimate power. I believe the newer Peloton Bike+ has a better system that produces accurate power readings as well.
Of course, as long as the competitors are bringing their own hardware, there will be ways to fake the data. I’m just pointing out it’s possible to measure power accurately and hardware that does it is widely available.
Personally, I find power readings to be useful because they help me understand the effort of cycling in different conditions. I can compare the readings I get in my garage to those from the climb up a steep mountain road, or into a gust of wind. Measuring my training based on my power output has helped me to go have experiences that I couldn’t have before.
Sure, overall you’re going to have a better experience if you can just roll with whatever happens and enjoy it (true in life and cinema).
I think that at some level, when I’m consuming fiction, in the back of my head I’m learning the “rules” of that media. That creates a set of expectations about the boundaries of what can happen. Done well, a work can make a powerful impression by breaking the rules. That only works if the audience is aware of the rules in the first place.
A lot of movies go for verisimilitude. They’re trying to look and feel real, which can make the audience identify more with the characters. When you see a movie that does a lot of things right, it can be jarring when it gets something wrong. Suddenly you might be thinking - they could afford a hundred stylists, take over city streets to film, but they couldn’t get a plumber? It can take you out of the movie. The filmmaker doesn’t want to break the rules by accident.
I didn't say they should, I simply pointed out that the "money [which] has to come from somewhere" is coming from somewhere, they place we all thought it came from - our data.
Measurement of conversions (ie. did somebody make a purchase after clicking the ad) is even more economically significant than targeting, and this is where ad publishers are most afraid of losing revenue due to privacy rules. The popular commentary on this subject is pretty detached from the business. The grandparent commenter’s “ban ad targeting” proposal manages to be both too extreme while also having little effect on data collection.
> The popular commentary on this subject is pretty detached from the business.
That’s because personalized ads are hostile in the extreme and shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place. It pits millions of dollars of psychological manipulation against our “self control”.
I’d rather the economy burn than continue this unethical practice.
My point is that only a fraction of user data collection is done for the purpose of ad targeting. So whether or not ad targeting should be banned for ethical reasons, such a ban is not a replacement for regulations of user data collection like those proposed in the article we are discussing here.
What is wrong with the conversion estimates they used in the days of broadcast TV and radio? Or even newspapers?
For that matter conversion metrics are not useful because the real high value purchase are not see ad buy thing. They are more of see many ads for SUV, when current car gets 'old' buy SUV. Many years of advertising are used in that targeting, and you cannot easily measure conversion.
Easily, no. But you can, at least in theory. With enough data, you can essentially tell if a customer has seen your ads, plus when and where (and not just your online ads - billboards and dealerships could be identified by using the customer's car to track their location). If they buy your car, and you see that they viewed your ads, maybe they even clicked one or otherwise browsed your site at some point, you can get some data from that. With enough aggregate data, you can begin to see correlations between certain ad viewing behavior and certain purchases.
Do they actually do this? Probably not, due to incompetence. But they could and eventually will if they aren't already.
I live in a neighborhood with impacted parking that’s poorly served by the local government. People keep parking in front of my driveway and blocking me in. If I call the cops they ignore me. If I call the tow company they come and tow away the offending car. Is this bad?
Suppose someone decided my front yard is a good place to store their belongings and dropped a shed there. Should I be able to hire movers to dispose of the shed? Or the police should be my only recourse?
I share the feeling that towing companies can be abusive and that’s not right. I think a better response is to regulate the towing companies and provide remedies. For example, make abusive towing practices illegal with heavy penalties (eg. if they tow illegally, they owe you $1000 per day you lose access to your vehicle). If it’s unfair to tow a vehicle after two minutes, make that illegal.
> If I call the cops they ignore me. If I call the tow company they come and tow away the offending car. Is this bad?
Yes. Here in Poland they'd get ticketed at the very least. It's easy money for them, pads their stats, and actually helps people. If it is somewhere where it blocks traffic (whether to house, pedestrians or otherwise) it would most likely also be towed. The company is contracted by city but they just do the towing, not law enforcement.
If this were right, you could cure your obesity by mixing the right multivitamin into your food? It seems like if fixing some nutrient deficiency were all it took, we’d have figured it out ages ago.
He also says it is important for marketstakeholders and the CFTC to investigate the clear conflict of interest (between FTX and Alameda).
And he ends saying that even though he is for innovation, he says that innovation which is found to increase risk unacceptably or fails to protect consumer is against the law.
Many of the TradFi HFT firms were in support of FTX's proposal. The people that ran FTX were generally reasonably competent at finance (ex Jane Street), but extremely cavalier about risk with other people's money, and extremely poor at operational management.
This is not a defense of them in any sense, other than to say that they were perfectly capable of being scumbags while also producing a good alternative to CME's futures products.
You can read about all of the people that thought FTX's proposal was good here:
> Many of the TradFi HFT firms were in support of FTX's proposal.
I read all the quotes. None appear to be Tradfi HFT firms. They instead appear to be a variety of VCs and individuals FTX paid money to or who had a crypto interest.
For example the Fidelity quote is not “Fidelity, the firm”. It is from “ Fidelity Digital Assets President Tom Jessop”
> Several letters noted the fact that the derivatives market had become concentrated in a dwindling number of players, and argued that it would be safer to trust middleman-free operations such as Bankman-Fried’s. “In the traditional intermediated model, a dependence on a limited number of clearing organizations creates a systematic concentration of risk,” Richard J. McDonald, chief regulatory counsel for Susquehanna International Group, wrote “The CFTC has an opportunity to minimize market risk by enabling platforms, such as FTX, to provide direct access to trading on margin without required intermediation.”
Susquehana is a very well respected tradfi quant firm: https://sig.com/
> FTX’s plan would “protect and empower” US investors, permitting retail investors access to products “previously available only to the small subset of well-resourced and powerful investors able to connect to the complex, traditional market infrastructure,” Peter L. Briger, CEO of investment manager Fortress Investment Group, wrote to the CFTC
Fortress Investment Group is a very well respected tradfi firm.
They're all right there. And this isn't even a complete list. If you search around, plenty of other traditional quant/HFT firms strongly supported the move. Basically the only two entities that opposed it were CME and Binance.
Was it? The author claims that it had previously been explored and found not to be worth it.
That could be puffery of course. But I have worked in several fields. A big advantage I bring is that I have an outsider's perspective and experience from a different domain ("Hey, why don't we try it this way?"). But a very big disadvantage is that when exploring something I find out that people often have thought of it and don't do things that way for good reason. For me that means I look before I speak.
A lot of the bomb-throwing suggestions of crypto revolutionaries is similar, and I have no reason to believe SBF was any different. In fact there's good reason to believe that SBF and his colleagues lacked adequate perspective, from their statements, their actions in retrospect, and frankly because of his MIT background. I'm also an MIT grad and was also an arrogant know-it-all into my late 20s (at least!) and am simply lucky that I got a few things right along the way so people were still talking to me by the time I grew up.
> The author claims that it had previously been explored and found not to be worth it.
The author isn't an unbiased observer here.
> That could be puffery of course. But I have worked in several fields. A big advantage I bring is that I have an outsider's perspective and experience from a different domain ("Hey, why don't we try it this way?"). But a very big disadvantage is that when exploring something I find out that people often have thought of it and don't do things that way for good reason. For me that means I look before I speak.
For all their fault's the principals at FTX were not pure outsiders here. They were all ex Jane Street employees (traditional finance HFT firm) who ran a futures exchange in crypto. And if you don't accept those credentials, have a look at who else signed off on their proposal in the above article.
The reason CME didn't like their proposal is that it would have forced them to innovate and stop lazily rent seeking off their past efforts.
> A lot of the bomb-throwing suggestions of crypto revolutionaries is similar, and I have no reason to believe SBF was any different. In fact there's good reason to believe that SBF and his colleagues lacked adequate perspective, from their statements, their actions in retrospect, and frankly because of his MIT background. I'm also an MIT grad and was also an arrogant know-it-all into my late 20s (at least!) and am simply lucky that I got a few things right along the way so people were still talking to me by the time I grew up.
Somewhat ironically given your argument, everything you've said here is an "outside view" perspective on why they might be wrong. Look at the content of their proposal, and I think you'll change your mind pretty quick. Or just trust the dozens of traditional finance firms that supported them against CME.
If you want a similarly "outside view" argument in favor of their proposal, basically everyone in finance supported it except the incumbent commodity futures exchange, which should tell you everything you need to know.
It's not slander[1] if it's true. Moreover, calling someone a "fraud" is likely to be viewed by a court as a statement of opinion, not of fact, and so it's likely non-actionable under U.S. common law.
You're right that a court might find you to be expressing an opinion if you call someone a fraud, but you'll spend a lot of money on your legal defense to find this out. Calling a deep-pocketed person a fraud is buying an expensive lawsuit.
Also, the more memorable mnemonic (at least IMO) is "slander is spoken, libel is not".
You seem to be quoting Spider-Man (if my quick google search is on point); I was quoting my law school professor.
Is Spider-Man well-known as the source of this mnemonic? I’m pretty sure lawyers were saying it for decades before the books/movies came out, but I could be wrong.
Well, memes tend to plant in our collective heads, so I guess yes?
Chances are that more people have seen spider man than met your law professor, but yes I'm not arguing that your law professor is a more authoritative source of law related stuff, just saying that I did remember the quote I quoted, for what is worth.
Dude he meant that the net worth was all a mirage, and that anyone had more money in their pocket than SBF pretended he had in his entire net worth (because he stole it). He called him a fraud right there and all you can say is that he should have shown more respect to poor little guy SBF, him the meanie "tradfi"?
I don’t get it. What makes it worth staying 1-2 years, but not 2-3 years? What happens at 2 years that makes you want to do the job before and not want to do it after?
If you never like your job I don’t think switching every 2 years helps. And if you are in it for the paycheck, 4 is usually optimal.
Personally, I found whether I’m having a good time depends on the team and the project. And usually one or the other changes periodically.
> What makes it worth staying 1-2 years, but not 2-3 years?
A 4% raise.
Management are idiots and will only give out small single digit percentage point raises while jumping companies will result in 20+% raises. The longer you stay with a company the further your salary falls behind.
This financial dictate means that your max tenure at a company should be 5 years--and definitely not even that long without a REALLY good reason.
It's also pretty frequent at larger companies that new hires (even those at a level lower) will get higher comp than tenured employees.
Many of these same companies also have very difficult promo processes, requiring you to effectively "got to trial" and defend why you should be promoted.
This exact scenario has occurred with multiple co-workers of mine (most have now left, the rest are actively interviewing:
If, after the months of preparation for promo you "got to trial" and do so successfully, you may find a newly hired, less experienced, lower leveled co-worker with no experience with any of the internal processes or tooling makes 25% more than you.
When companies behave this way, what's the incentive to stick around?
Yeah. If companies want people to stay, they should just pay for it. Pay more, give better and frequent raises, offer more benefits, more everything. Then people won't want to leave for the other companies offering better compensation. It's very simple.
Any "red flag" talk is just companies trying to disincentivize employees from effectively negotiating better compensation for themselves. They're trying to eliminate employee BATNAs.
Lots of tech companies give a stock grant that vests over 4 years. Then each year an additional “refresher” grant that also vests over 4 years. So your comp increases each year because of the stacking grants (a lot better than 4%) then drops a lot after year 4 when the initial grant expires.
Obviously many circumstances can change the equation.
Idk, I got a ~400% raise over 3 years as I showed I was more valuable than my comp and got the right ears to listen to that, with help of a V-level who recognized it. I’m not saying that will be everyone’s experience, but its odds become much more favorable for people hopping startups with smaller overall org charts
Is it possible that, given the information your employer has, they can determine you are worth no more than a 4% raise? While, on the other hand, the prospective new employer does not have the same information (the experience of actually being your employer) and risks a 20% premium? In the end, maybe the market is actually operating efficiently?
In a typical company, raises are budgeted based on a company-wide assessment of how much people "should" get. So even if your manager is sure you're worth 20% more, you simply can't get a 20% raise without some exceptional justification.
For me, it's the fact that roughly 1 year seems to be the average cutoff point for how long I can tolerate doing something that feels meaningless to me and otherwise doesn't bring me any financial advantage that would allow me to duck out of the game altogether.
Have you considered the possibility that with a 1-2 year time horizon, you're more or less setting yourself up for exactly the series of meaningless jobs with limited financial upside that you're seeing as the reason for your time horizon?
Variety also tends to bring financial advantage, increased skills and exposure to new knowledge, a larger personal network in the same time, and if most (but not all) jobs are unsatisfying, variety gives you more chances to eventually find one that's the exception worth staying with.
May I ask: Why do you think 4y is optimal for pay increase?
For me, I would swap anyway after 2y for the below reasons but I've found that optimal for income...
Year 1:
* You're learning a lot
* You're on significantly more money and better benefits than before
* You can plausibly believe that all the cultural/structural issues you have will be solved in the next 12m
Year 3:
* None of the above. You're learning very little, you've gotten cost of living raises or a little above but not the 20% + a job change should bring, you realise now the business has no intention of dealing with it's issues. You will just have to live with them...
1-2 years can happen due to changes like your manager changes, large number of your team mates leave, company gets acquired. Such circumstances can bring about major changes to culture/environment/scope.
School shootings kill dozens of people per year in the US, it’s a similar magnitude risk as lightning strikes or train crashes.
Infant mortality in the US is more common and indicative of problems that affect a lot of people. Namely, inequality in access to high-quality prenatal health care, and obesity. If you’re coming to work as a software engineer in the US, you are going to get good health insurance for yourself in your family. Obesity is potentially more relevant - lots of wealthy professionals in the US are obese. Not sure how much this tends to affect people who immigrate from healthier countries.
School shooting is bad example, it gets a lot of headlines but means nothing when averaged for whole US population.
There are other, more serious topics which somebody from ie Europe who isn't desperate for money should consider. Overall workoholic culture and much less free paid days and vacations (no, 20 days per year isn't that great rather bare minimum, 30 begins to be interesting if you actually want to have great life before retirement, on top of plenty of public holidays). Overall crime rates are important though, and thats very high in US for an european. Your taxes are (well repeatedly were, and definitely will be again) used to kill some poor civilians half around the globe for no moral reason whatsoever, bravo for making the world a better place. Low food/produce quality, the amount of NOK chemistry and procedures for growing and raising cattle that is banned in EU is staggering. Most of the country apart from big cities is remarkably full of backwardish fanatical christians, I mean isn't teaching evolution still banned in most schools? Abortions topic?
Healthcare is a topic on its own. There were many posts here before that even with good insurance, you pay hefty sums and very well earning folks were desperate to save enough for high quality healthcare for retirement, especially once you know you have some long term issue for the rest of your life (which we all end up having unless dying way too early). What about when you are between jobs? Or if you retire, since obviously this is when you need good medical system the most? If you had big accident/serious long term illness and employer fires you?
Raising kids - TCO is ridiculously huge, mainly due to University fees that in Europe you often simply just don't have, or they are rather token sums. Public schools are often crap with heavily underpaid teachers (the salary part is probably true everywhere though).
So you end up with higher income but you can lose it very easily if you have bad luck / ignore your health, or simply have few smart kids. Not even going into the topic of being treated as sub-human by US government, since you are not US citizen and somehow doesn't deserve basic human rights when it suits them.
Of course there are many positives but that's another topic.
