In the recent thread about this topic [1] people mentioned that USDC is also not fully backed by pure cash.
Assuming USDC has no funny business like tether seems to, how is this any different than companies like PayPal, which presumably also don't just have a bank account sitting with billions of dollars cash, backing all of their virtual cash?
I mean, PayPal is not a bank, and if for some reason they become insolvent, your deposits will be gone too.
That being said, I don't keep large deposits in PayPal, and I've never had trouble getting PayPal money directly deposited into my bank account via ACH. Can the same be said for USDT?
But there doesn't seem to be much evidence that tether is printing USDT, only a history of them losing people's deposits due to random banking related issues.
I'm really struggling to understand these numbers.
In some other articles I'm seeing that it offers 100% protection against hospitalisation and death.
"The J&J vaccine was 85 per cent effective at preventing severe Covid-19. Twenty-eight days after the jab, it offered “complete protection” from hospitalisation and death." [1]
Wouldn't having "severe" infection require hospitilisation?
Presumably severe includes some people who don’t need hospitalization. Some high risk patients can get new monoclonal antibody treatments that may prevent them from needing hospitalization. Some people are sent home from the ED with oximeters and told to come back if their oxygen saturation drops below a certain threshold and a doctor calls them everyday. Hospitals in hard-hit area have to be very judicious about only admitting patients who really need it so there may be some severe/high risk cases that are just closely followed as an outpatient.
> Some people have to, because there simply isn't any hospital in their area with space for them.
Citation needed on that one. There is a lot of media fearmongering out there that results in outliers and things that are normal practice getting taken out of context and blown up into something scary.
You can see it in statistics. When the hospitalization starts dropping while case counts are going up, it's because more cases are being managed at home.
Prioritizing critical care is normal when care is in short supply, but it means that you are more likely to have to deal with COVID at home when the local healthcare system is overstressed.
> on Nov. 1, the Covid Tracking Project’s seven-day average showed about 80,000 new cases — which we would predict should lead to about 2,800 new hospitalizations a week later, by Nov. 8. Instead, there were 2,600, a little fewer than expected. On Nov. 15, we had 146,000 new cases, which should have resulted in about 5,100 new hospitalizations by Nov. 22. However, there were fewer than 3,700. This pattern of declining rates of hospitalization continued through the end of November.
> What is happening is pretty simple: Because hospitals are filling up, they are admitting fewer and fewer people. Any doctor or nurse will tell you that as the demand for beds soars, the threshold for admission rises with it...
> The decision on whether to admit a patient depends on two things: clinical judgment and bed availability. Critically ill patients will always be admitted. But as hospitals start to fill up, those who are less sick — younger covid patients, or those whose oxygen levels aren’t yet dangerously low — get sent home. These patients would be safer in a hospital bed, but there isn’t one available for them anymore.
I think they are saying none of the hospitalized cases occurred after twenty-eight days, but statistically they can't really say it provides 100% hospitalization prevention at that point even if that is accurate. At lease one expert on CNN indicated protection was continuing to increase throughout the study which is promising. I'd like to see a follow-up.
It was my understanding that Google / Apple do not charge a fee on in-app purchases which are not platform specific and which use third-party payment processing.
Never having played Fortnite, I assumed that in-app purchases are specific to your account and would carry-over if you moved from Android to iOS. Is that not the case?
I've been to a MLM conference once (or well, a conference by a company who distributed purely via MLM) and I saw people buying into it as well. When I googled them (this was back around 2006), I saw tons of domains and websites with these products all from people with their own "company" (lol).
You know what sells? Sampling, and success stories. The first thing I got told is that I must believe in the product. Yeah, that's true with any product, but where's the proof? Well, you can convince people with sampling. As for the success stories, people high on the pyramid are around at these conferences as well. The brother of my aunt (cold side) had earned more than a million with this MLM scheme. Which got me to check out the conference in the first place. At the conference he appeared to be well respected within the scene. I didn't know this beforehand (my aunt told me afterwards even though she got me in contact with him) but what did he do before that? Well, he was in a cult. Now he was a hardcore Christian in a MLM scheme. As they say, "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."
I'm not at all surprised there's these MLM-esque videos related to cryptocurrency out there. As far's I'm concerned, BitConnect is just the tip of the iceberg. We haven't witnessed the mask falling from Tether yet (many red flags have been raised though), nor Bitcoin in general (many red flags as well). Bitcoin value has been going down the past days, btw, even before BitConnect announcement. You can esp see the decline from Jan 15.
Had a very similar experience - a friend of our family (also a member of a, let's call it, high-intensity christian denomination) got started in a MLM (MonaVie) and invited me to their "internal" event (one aimed at people already in the network).
Oh. My. God. What I saw there was a textbook definition of a cult, a pure affective death spiral[0] instantiated in our material world. People were literally one-upping one another in telling how happy they are by being the part of this MLM, and how happy they will be when it makes them rich. The overall atmosphere was pretty similar to that Bitconeeeeeeeeeect video.
> The first thing I got told is that I must believe in the product.
Yeah, that's the thing that kept me from getting recruited into MLMs back when I was more naïve about people involved - I could tell the products were bullshit, and selling them required you to lie about either the qualities of the product or your expertise on the topic (in case of financial products). Both of which I find to be despicable behaviour.
"An affective death spiral (or happy death spiral) occurs when positive attributes of a theory, person, or organization combine with the Halo effect in a feedback loop, resulting in the subject of the affective death spiral being held in higher and higher regard. In effect, every positive thing said about the subject results in more than one additional nice thing to say about the subject on average. This cascades like a nuclear chain reaction."
I'd never heard of MonaVie so I Google'd it and read the Wikipedia page - was slightly surprised to get Amazon adverts for $40 bottles of fruit juice at the same time....
You're conflating the value and price of an asset. E.g. if you own an asset like a stock that pays dividends, the value of that stock is the net present value of the future dividends. The price is determined by buyers and sellers and can diverge widely from the value.
It's related to the distinction between investing and speculating. Investing is based on whether the intrinsic value is below or above the price, while speculating is just based on the price.
Let me rephrase that: it takes a lesser percentage of bitcoin holders vs fiat currency holders selling their assets to collapse the value of their respective currencies.
Or even better: it's nearly impossible to do that with fiat currency, because there are checks and balances in place.
I'm quite biased on the whole AR thing, as I worked at Meta for almost three years, but I think that the HoloLens is a fantastic piece of technology, and that Augmented Reality Head Mounted Displays will be the next big computing revolution.
Currently I'm working on a large HoloLens project for the aircraft industry. But the amount of possibilities I can think of with a HoloLens (or similar device) is limitless.
The HoloLens has amazing tracking and latency. In a couple more years, when HoloLens and/or competitors release a device with a large field of view, HoloLens-like tracking/latency, and leap motion-like hand recognition, it's going to be very exciting.
Why? LLCs are pass-through entities. US residents will get taxed as income, and non-US residents will not have to pay any tax if their income is not effectively connected with a US trade or business (which basically means that employees do not do any of the work within the US).
Different countries have different laws. What might be seen as "pass through" under US law can sometimes be seen as opaque in an EU country, for example. Sometimes the situation or the double taxation treaty (if there is one) offers no clear solution.
Most western countries also have CFC laws you need to be aware of. CFC laws are essentially "see through" taxation laws to combat tax avoidance, looking through certain corporate structures you would use to avoid tax, e.g. by somehow siphoning off money (legally, through IP payments, interest payments, etc) to a zero or low tax entity somewhere.
I've had some tax disputes before and I can tell you: most of these civil servants are unaware of the international context they're operating in. They mainly audit local restaurants, bookstores, etc. Nothing "exotic". Talking to them, before you meet with some people higher up, can literally be a crapshoot. Some countries, for example, might try to tax your US LLC income as dividend income, before applying corporate (or personal income) tax to it again.
This is obviously often incorrect, but given most people set up US entities because they're cheap / etc (or at least some of the people using Atlas do), you should be aware that a dispute with your local tax authority can follow. Because they are the ones losing current and future revenue. Those can have nasty consequences if you don't have the funds available to hire, say, a good tax lawyer.
That said, totally agree Atlas (or setting up a US LLC) can be super valuable. Just make sure your tax situation is looked at, at home.
Most EU jurisdictions have required minimum capital contributions from the founding shareholder(s), e.g. 10-20.000 euro per entity. Then there's a ton of stuff to file (some countries are more bureaucratic than others), in some jurisdictions you need to visit a civil law notary to incorporate, etc.
A lawyer can easily take care of that for you for a reasonable fee, but most bootstrappers won't consider it, given the price.
Assuming USDC has no funny business like tether seems to, how is this any different than companies like PayPal, which presumably also don't just have a bank account sitting with billions of dollars cash, backing all of their virtual cash?
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27151370