> That money's not going to the homeless people. It's going to the people who run the services to support them. You think they'd want to see homelessness end?
Yes, I think those people want to see homelessness end. Why else would you want a career in that field?
Climate scientists also want action to be taken to fight climate change, even if it might put them out of a job. Folks who work for the UN to tackle world hunger want world hunger to end, even if it puts them out of a job.
I don't think rank-and-file workers are psychopaths.
A huge portion of that $400M is spent getting people off the streets - they aren't spending $400M on 10,000 homeless people. They're spending 400M on tens of thousands of housing insecure people and after all of the rent support, healthcare, and mental health expense, there are still 10,000 people that they haven't been able to get off the streets.
This is the SF housing project's self-defense argument. But the budget has doubled and homelessness has increased. It's also a sorry defense of the city gov to say that such a small city actually has much higher homelessness numbers that are masked by ludicrous spending.
I mean.. have you seen what has happened to rents at the same time? The core problem is that housing costs way too much here. Obviously more people are going to become homeless when rent prices increase by 20% per year, and obviously it is going to cost more to service homeless people when the prevailing rent has increased as much as it has. None of these things are mysteries.
The cost of housing isn't the problem, this has been proven over and over again in SF. Yes, housing helps, but its not a cure. During the CV outbreak SF has had a hard time getting people to go into hotels when offered, because people had to abstain from drinking/drugs and to take their medication.
There's a really interesting character from SF who posts on twitter (@MyTwolffamily) about his personal experience of being a homeless drug addict, it might be enlightening to read some of his posts.
If you cut a 40k check annually to every homeless person and handed it to them on Jan 1st, I would bet the majority would be back on the streets by April, most of them earlier.
What's the homeless person to bureaucrat/middleman ratio? I'd be very curious to see a breakdown of what sort of organizations are involved, how many people are involved, and where all that money is actually flowing.
SF's budget is basically $40-50k per homeless person yet each person receives a fraction of that, maybe 10%, its incredibly inefficient. Its even been called "The Homeless Industrial Complex" by a variety of outspoken locals.
That's exactly what it is. If you recall, these image based captchas were originally in 2007 for digitizing books. [1]
In 2012, Google started using captchas to identify house numbers from google street view. [2]
Now, users are identifying cars, bikes, traffic lights, and crosswalks most of the time. While Google/Alphabet has been mum on what specifically they're using the data for, it is speculated by engineers at competing firms that they are using this data to help Alphabet's subsidiary, Waymo, with its self-driving car program. [3] This data is either used as training data or to validate outputs that were already classified by their system.
I have serious, serious doubts about the whole approach of "identify known objects in a camera feed so you can try not to hit them". I don't know what the current approaches are but there needs to be some kind of subsumption setup where if you don't recognize an object, at the very least you assume it's a stationary solid object and you don't hit it. It doesn't matter if your classifier says it's a brick, or a grandma, or a hibiscus, or (unknown). Unless you've positively identified it as something that's safe to hit (say, a plastic bag wafting along in the breeze) then don't hit it.
If you do have an identification then you can layer behaviours on top of this (eg. Is it a person? They usually walk forward or in the direction they're looking, so anticipate this.) But the default behaviour cannot be "dunno what that is so I'll ignore it".
"Don't hit the thing" is the most basic, fundamental behaviour for a self driving vehicle.
And this is why I like to call them "Self-Crashing Cars".
I'm fully capable of ploughing in to moving and stationary objects at high speed, under acceleration, myself. Thank you very much.
And OTA updates that can change the behaviour of the vehicle between uses? Just no. I have enough trouble switching between my Japanese and European cars (one of each) where the indicator stalks are on opposite sides of the steering column. I'm forever indicating my intention to turn with the wipers!
Well, I'll be damned. It looks like there's going to be a general strike primarily organized by the US Government. I guess horseshoe theory is real after all.
Seriously though, it'll be interesting to see how much disruption is necessary to force the hand of the legislative and executive branch to finally fund the government.
With quantum computing it's expected that the ECDSA public-key cryptography used in bitcoin addresses will be broken. However, the ECDSA public key is only exposed when your first transaction out of the address is signed. If you only use addresses once (recommended practice), an attacker would have to break your private key faster than it takes for your transaction to propagate to the entire network in order to steal your coins. It would take a long time between the first cracking of ECDSA to nearly instantly being able to crack it. For example, the first publicly-disclosed attack on SHA1 took 110 GPU-years.
If the accounts listed by the OP have sent transactions in the past and reused addresses (which was common back in 2010/11), it's possible the private keys can be bruteforced in the future.
If not, we don't know the ECDSA public key for the address. Bruteforcing it gets a LOT harder--but never say never.
Your source uses poor methodology to calculate inequality, and is really outdated.
The 2014 article you're citing uses this 2013 article [1] as a source. This uses data from bitcoinrichlist.com, which contains balances for all active bitcoin addresses at the time.
This sort of blockchain analysis isn't super useful, especially in 2017, because some extremely-rich people have funds in multiple addresses and some extremely-rich addresses contain funds for multiple people.
The richest bitcoin address in 2017 has 1.8B worth of bitcoin, but it's the cold storage address for hundreds of thousands of bitfinex users [2]. It's possible that many of the other addresses on the richlist are coinbase vault addresses or cold storage addresses for other custodial wallets. The important part is that, with some publicly disclosed exceptions, we don't know if a rich address belongs to a single person or an organization.
Meanwhile, the poorest addresses contain UTXOs worth pennies that cost more in fees to send than they're worth. These addresses have been completely abandoned by their users and have no practical owner.
Even addresses with a spendable balance don't correspond to one user ever since Hierarchical Deterministic address generation has become the standard. HD wallets generate a new address for every incoming transaction for greater privacy [3]. A typical user may have their funds spread over dozens of addresses.
That being said, I'm sure wealth is highly concentrated in the bitcoin ecosystem: it's just very hard to quantify to what degree it is.
Disclaimer: I hold bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies.
One public key contains 1.8B USD, but take a look at the address again:
3D2oetdNuZUqQHPJmcMDDHYoqkyNVsFk9r
See how it starts with a 3? Most normal bitcoin addresses start with a 1. The 3 means that it's a pay to script hash address, which means that its likely a multisignature address.
Multisig addresses require multiple signatures to send funds. This could be two out of three possible signatures, seven out of seven possible signatures, fifty out of one hundred possible signatures, it all depends how it is configured.
In short though it kind of works like nuclear weapons where you need multiple keys help by different people to authenticate a transaction.
> The game's top cat brought in $117,712.12 (£87,686.11) when it sold on Saturday, 2 December.
Is it weird that I think that the cat that was sold for 100K was a wash trade (someone trading with themself)? Who would honestly pay 100K for a 'rare' digital cat? Just because something's rare doesn't mean it's valuable.
I think it's interesting foreshadowing that the developers are calling these "breedable Beanie Babies".
Well, I would say there are two things to consider:
1) it's not just an investment in the asset.
It pays dividends. The asset can breed once per week, so that could be $1k+ per week generated.. paying for itself over time. Since this is the lone genesis kitty, its offspring could fetch a totally arbitrary value.
2) This is ethereum we are talking about. If the ether was bought 1 year ago today, it would have cost $1,557.1. Someone could have made a $1.5k investment 1 year ago which is now paying for itself weekly.
It doesn't pay dividends in ETH, it pays dividends in more kitties. Is that really a dividend?
If apple shares could only pay dividends in more apple shares instead of USD would they have any value?
> This is ethereum we are talking about. If the ether was bought 1 year ago today, it would have cost $1,557.1. Someone could have made a $1.5k investment 1 year ago which is now paying for itself weekly.
Ethereum at least has a purpose, cryptokitties do not seem to have one. Besides, you can't just say that the price of one crypto asset will go up because a different one has gone up in the past!
"On May 22, 2010, the yellow stamp was auctioned once again by David Feldman in Geneva, Switzerland. It sold "for at least the $2.3 million price [that] it set a record for in 1996"." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treskilling_Yellow
Apple shares are worth money because they entitle one to a share of ownership and voting rights in a company that engages in real wealth production, and would be worth lots even if they reinvested all their dividends like Amazon.
The same cannot be said of these kittens... that this obvious point even needs to be stated is just sad.
He's not suggesting the markets are imaginary, simply suggesting that there isn't a backing asset to stabilize them. Sure people buy counter-strike skins right now but there is very little reason to believe that the current version of counter-strike in which these skins exist will be popular in perpetuity. At some point people will move on from the game, maybe even to the next version of counter-strike... at which point those assets values will decrease significantly. Just like people moved on from beanie babies, and just like they'll move on from crypto kitties.
To suggest that these things are anything other that highly speculative is intellectually dishonest at best, gambling at worst.
I think the point is one can imagine someone believing their $117k cat breeding lots of kittens that they can manage to sell for ETH (and/or later exchanged to USD), netting them a profit after some time.
> Are they buying an option on the right to receive dividends at some indeterminate point in the distant future?
> Do they think they'll receive a fraction of the enterprise value when Google gets bought by a bigger company?
> Will Google get sold off piece by piece and they'll get a pro-rata share of the liquidation proceeds?
Yes, but also a bet on other people's demand for those things - its asset backed. Since they all are based on USD I think they're a little safer bet than a cat fad.
We saw this Virtual Pet Movie already in 2010 with Zynga and people buying virtual food with real $$ to feed Zynga Cats on facebook site and sub sequent Zynga IPO at $10 .
After few years of IPO we all know where Zynga virtual pet compapny is .
Project entropia is a notorious MMO that ran on real money, more or less. Your bullets literally cost real money. $330k for a space station in it, that the person hoped to make money off of.
That's an MMORPG for kids. You can go on quests, enter contests, chat with friends, post on their forums, make guilds, do battle against other pets, solve puzzles, trade on the NEODAQ, and make a little home. Pets cost a few bucks. Honestly from googling neopets it sounds an awful lot like a better version of club penguin.
With cryptokitties we're talking about 100K for a picture of cat. From what I've read the platform is dedicated only to buying and selling these cats.
Yea but, the thing about ethereum is its conceptually about building on top of the technology.
There is nothing stopping people from building on top of even the cryptocat system, making a game where these cats are usable for any of your listed game mechanics.
It doesn't need any kind of api-integration to cryptocats, it just needs to reference the already public cat compendium.
Wow this is an idea that I hadn't even considered before! That any smart contract is just a little piece of code with an API and an Ether cost. I'm getting so many ideas for cryptokitty horse racing...
it was for kids in 2000 but now those kids are 20-30+. They never made the switch to mobile and that is when the site truly lost any chance of new players. In its heyday it was not uncommon to regularly see people with 10k$+ spent on their accounts.
While the site did have those features you mentioned, they were glitchy and never updated past the original 1990s php code. xss everywhere losing your account was inevitable
what people used the site for was the same as the crypto kitties. Collecting digital widgets and participating in the markets the buying and selling of those things created.
100k for a crypto kitty is pretty nuts but its the most rare and valuable not like they are commonly hitting that.
on neopets you could buy "wearables" to dress your pet but these couldn't be sold for the in game currency and buying in game points and items was illegal.
Neopoints went for $3 per million (now maybe a buck or two) on the forums dedicated to cheating which hosted off site marketplaces.
if you were a cheeky 13 year old and figured out how to use xss to steal a lot of cookies or even better their database with an sql injection you could easily amass trillions in neopoints.
When the off site marketplaces stick the price at a few bucks per million that is a lot of money you could make when you have thousands of stacked accounts with rare items and pets and neopoints.
I would say it is extremely likely someone spent 100k in a single purchase at least once. I personally saw people selling what they amassed at a bulk price of 10k many times.
The real money maker was selling hash lists and database leaks of account info. Sell accounts for a buck a piece, maybe one in 50 had anything decent, so just selling lists worked out to be a better way to make money because you aren't responsible for securing the hacked goods, and you make a profit every time even if the account is empty
gosh this makes me want to play again. maybe not violate the cfaa stealing their database, or performing xss to steal cookies, even though that is the most fun part of the game. Maybe looking for bugs to report them rather than to steal accounts items etc would be fun. Either way
If you want to hang out and rum some fuzzers or figure something out let me know.
i will for sure rejoin to make bots again. writing bots for neopets (containing password stealers) was my very first taste of programming, and the code I wrote was surprisingly succinct and elegant.
It is a now pretty much dead fleshed out version of this. You can play all the features you mentioned of the game for free. Anything you can officially pay for is cosmetic, like clothing for your pet.
There are also entire off site communities dedicated towards selling items and neopoints
the site was bought from its founders by Viacom for 100m
I used to trade digital assets on games like this exactly like people trade crypto currencies today.
Both the interest in having a digital collectible and using electronic points as a store of value
Monero and dash both have fairly good privacy built into the protocol [1] [2], although monero suffers from large transaction sizes and dash suffers from centralization as a result of this.
Was meant to cover those particular cases, which were created specifically to deal with the lack of anonymity within Bitcoin and its derivatives, as far as I know.
Yes, I think those people want to see homelessness end. Why else would you want a career in that field?
Climate scientists also want action to be taken to fight climate change, even if it might put them out of a job. Folks who work for the UN to tackle world hunger want world hunger to end, even if it puts them out of a job.
I don't think rank-and-file workers are psychopaths.