Look the ICO space is way too young for all the judgment people are passing on here. The SEC clearly wants to let this play out. No one has gone to jail yet.
The government has already started to relax the ability for non accredited investors to invest in startups and that was under the last administration. These rules are recent but they are there, they are very limited though and ICOs blow the top off of those rules.
ICOs are forcing the SECs hand and I think it show cases the interest that exist in the public to get into these early stage startups. I won't be surprised if the rules are relaxed even further to legalize these types of coins even if they are considered securities, especially under this administration.
Everyone is saying that you are limiting yourself by offering an ICO. You are giving away zero equity for the promise that your product and service will offer these people something in most cases, that is just like a kickstarter. Furthermore, nothing stops you from raising money after the ICO.
Anyway, this is a fantastic new vehicle for startups and I believe it will absolutely change the game. The VCs are a little mad because they are being shut out of the best rounds, where they would normally get the most equity.
At the end of the day what matters most is if startups can start get funding and hire people and add value to the economy. That is what the SEC has to balance with the public interest on the other end.
You say this, but by most objective measures ICOs look like a mechanism to provide most of the benefits of raising capital (and then some) with none of the oversight or constraints.
ICOs are not like a kickstarter for the same reason the SEC cares about them: as a buyer of tokens your capital can arguably be seen as an investment which is expected to generate a capital return based on a market clearing price determined by the value attributed to a going concern. Also if we are being honest here, the high dollar amounts and high volatility we are seeing also matter greatly in terms of guessing if the SEC is going to expend resources on this. Once a few of these crater and hundreds of millions of dollars are lost I'd expect regulatory intervention to happen rapidly.
And 2008, 1999, and 1929 called and take issue with your claim that the most important thing for the SEC (and all of us) to consider is startup funding and not the public interest. The exposure of individual investor capital to undisclosed risk, due to a lack of prospectus, legally required accounting practices, financial statements, etc, can cause major negative effects on all of us if and when capital is mis-allocated, particularly if it is tied to derivatives, is overleveraged, or there are other potential market contagions due to price correlations to similar assets, etc.
When you consider the role of the SEC and the history of speculative bubbles, run an ICO without strong legal protections, based on precedent, at your own peril, I say.
ICOs are forcing the SECs hand and I think it show cases the interest that exist in the public to get into these early stage startups.
Ponzi schemes are forcing the SEC's hand, and I think it showcases the interest that exists in the public to get into these early stage pyramid schemes.
The fact that the public is interested in something doesn't make the SEC say "oh, ok, that's fine then". The SEC's job isn't to get out of the way of the public. The SEC's job is to get in the public's way, in order to protect the public from scams -- which means the more public interest there is in something, the closer the SEC will be looking at it.
I agree with you that the SEC is there to protect the public.
You are incorrectly saying that ICOs are a Ponzi scheme. When they are in fact too new to be labeled as anything. If they were in fact all Ponzi Schemes then people would already be in jail.
Secondly the SEC is there to balance both sides of the equation. Companies interests and the public dumping money into scams.
> If they were in fact all Ponzi Schemes then people would already be in jail.
Well it was the SEC that oddly of all the ICOs published an opinion on the DAO, the one ICO that was hard forked (erased from existence). Though if the DAO wasn't erased, based on the SEC opinion it is fair to say they would have brought a case right? I mean its not exactly fair for them to conclude the DAO was an illegal sale of securities and then not enforce the law.
Separately, we have instances of the SEC contacting ICOs and informing them they are in violation of the law and the ICO investments being returned to investors...so I think the SEC has fully weighed both sides of the equation.
Certainly the comment you are responding to did not say ICOs are ponzi schemes, they just simply applied your ICO logic to another situation, but truthfully many ICOs will turn out to be ponzi schemes and outright fraud, and likely the DAO was neither (surely it would be fraud if they were the hacker) but they still were likely violating securities laws.
The SEC isn't there to protect the public. It is there to make sure the public will continue to trust the markets. Keep in mind that the whole game is powered by trust, if that trust gets damaged too much everything will collapse.
I didn't mean to imply that ICOs were Ponzi schemes. I was just trying to draw an analogy to explain why "the public wants this" isn't an argument which is liable to convince the SEC to back off.
The thing is that Google has absolutely gone down questionable path from their early days.
It is a little unfair to think this problem exists only within Google. Time and time again we are reminded why corporations will evolve to become as greedy and as protective of their turf expansive of their power and monopolistic as they can get, even if good people are running them. It is the system itself that does this, corporations evolve to survive and to thrive. That in of itself isn't a bad thing but you need checks and balances. Things like the Supreme Court saying that Corporations are people or all the money pouring into our political process those are things that have to change.
Even the best of them will eventually become the worst of them. Google is now evil for sure, no doubt about that, but there have been and there will be many others.
Schmidt was pretty clear in his book that he believes his business success is an indicator of virtue, and that he believes he should use Google and his wealth to intentionally seek to manipulate modern culture. It's a disturbing notion and I've never understood why people weren't more concerned about it.
If every significant avenue of communication used by people is controlled and censored by a group, no matter who it is, there is no option for progress. Any attempt to change social values will inevitably run up against a wall of not being able to actually express proof that societies values have changed. Imagine if tomorrow every human being on Earth woke up realizing nudity is a strange thing to get worked up about. What would happen? The idea would die, isolated, because even if people said they thought nudity was fine, they could never prove it as the communications networks they use would censor out anything containing nudity, stultifying culture and freezing it to whatever was acceptable in the early 2000s.
> and that he believes he should use Google and his wealth to intentionally seek to manipulate modern culture. It's a disturbing notion and I've never understood why people weren't more concerned about it.
Because they're pushing the progressive agenda, so who in the media, government, or academia is going to stand in their way? As far as those parties are concerned, Google is doing what corporations "should" do.
I would say Shmidt's agenda is more neo-liberal than progressive. Not that I endorse it, but corporations pushing an agenda is not new[1] and not limited to the left[2][3], so not even conservative media will stand in their way either since that has been happening for a long time on the right.
Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A aren't out sending hundreds of millions financing think tanks and lobbyists in Washington, they are just trying to run their own business with their own agenda. And the scale of the companies are orders of magnitude smaller than Google, both are medium sized family owned businesses.
Where are these praise Google for its liberalism stories? Prior to Trumpism and the breakdown of modern politics, the only time I really heard people talking about how wonderful it was that Google was liberal was the occasional fluff piece about their solar programs.
So where are the stories of senators saying, "those guys at Google, they're what we should be striving for." As opposed to senators raking them over the coals (rightly) for tax avoidance.
I wouldn't ask what's so progressive about censorship, but why have progressives seemingly embraced it? or at least distanced themselves from a more firm defense of free speech.
I think this article is a good encapsulation of the progressive ambivalence on free speech, which has provided a rationale for violence against speakers like Charles Murray (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/middleb...), the violent protests that have followed Milo Yiannopoulos, and "safe spaces" on college campuses.
parent poster is likely referring to the right to sit in your office all day spouting pseduoscientific essays on why 20% of your coworkers probably should not be working in the job they have.
> Because they're pushing the progressive agenda, so who in the media, government, or academia is going to stand in their way?
Well, the media largely only cares for agendas that fit their advertiser's preferences. Their advertiser's preferences are dictated by what they think will help their business... they're not particularly concerned with the nature of any particular agenda, only whether an agenda benefits them.
The government is the largely similar, but rather than advertisers it's political parties balancing appeal to their donors, lobbyists and other powers. To a minor degree also to their base, but hand-waving and obscurantism tends to limit this need.
Academia increasingly does seem pretty screwed up (STEM isn't free of issues, but the really nutty stuff is mostly in the 'humanities'). I suspect firing Damore will probably sate their blood-lust for a while.
> Schmidt was pretty clear in his book that he believes his business success is an indicator of virtue, and that he believes he should use Google and his wealth to intentionally seek to manipulate modern culture.
Which book, and could you perhaps share some excerpts, or a link with more information?
As to your first paragraph, many companies and founders would say the the same thing, no? "We want to change the world by doing X (through their business)". Also, what other metric for success is there in the current culture of the USA other than business success? Not that I'm saying that's bad or good...
> Schmidt was pretty clear in his book that he believes his business success is an indicator of virtue, and that he believes he should use Google and his wealth to intentionally seek to manipulate modern culture. It's a disturbing notion and I've never understood why people weren't more concerned about it.
Google proved that all you need is a colorful logo and a stupid catch phrase ("Don't be evil") to get people to treat you as an infallible, altruistic entity - regardless of the fact that your actions tell a completely different story.
Like Apple, Google has become a religion for their fans. As with all religions, inconvenient facts are dutifully ignored by members of the Holy Order of Goog. I find the worship of corporations even more difficult to grasp than Scientology.
> Google proved that all you need is a colorful logo and a stupid catch phrase ("Don't be evil") to get people to treat you as an infallible, altruistic entity - regardless of the fact that your actions tell a completely different story.
I don't think the logo or catch-phrase have much to do with it. Google's search engine was orders of magnitude better than anything else when it came out (that's how they won the market) and they've used their dominance of the web to improve their search to the point where the search box can read your mind. That is why people treat them as good -- because "morally good" and "usefully good" are difficult to separate.
You see Apple users (and maybe Linux users?) as religious zealots and assume they must have been tricked by a pretty logo or some CS hazing ritual. What's actually going on is that they're reacting to one very positive experience (maybe along some dimension that you don't care about) and following the human inclination to extrapolate that experience to the whole product/company.
I think you're mostly right. After all, the most hated companies tend to be ones with poor customer service, not ones who do the most harm.
I do think Google cultivating an image of being just a quirky group of nerds (rather than a profitable and influential company) contributed to them seeming benign, and their logo and slogan are part of that.
Which is why freedom of assembly is lumped in with freedom of speech. As long as two people can congregate together, they can communicate with one another.
Except they're not. And these platforms (Google, Facebook, CloudFlare, Twitter, Youtube, Berkeley, Patreon, Namecheap, etc) are all daily indicating, to varying degrees, that they are willing to step in as a third-party between two consenting individuals "congregating" and "communicating" in order to censor them.
Such individuals, if they choose to say things that the platform doesn't like at an institutional level, then they don't have that right anymore because they get removed/de-listed,banned/de-platformed. Generally, I'm a free-market person, and I'd advocate that entities should have the right to deal with their own platform how they see fit. But in this case, they're collaborating with traditional media, learning institutions and social-agenda groups in order to create a giant echo chamber. We're watching that play out right now in that certain non-left and non-pc speech behavior is condemned and those that wish to express them are de-platformed.
We may not always agree with those points, or find them palatable, but up until now I think we've been navigating a middle-line where general public opinion ebbed and flowed between the two sides. It's tipped incredibly to one side on numerous issues, and I'm afraid that a specific set of viewpoints are now pervading our society. Once it gets to a point, it's only a matter of time before entire generations are raised believing only the accepted-viewpoint. It may be a bad example, but you see it happening already in public-schools where teachers are actively pushing social-agenda issues onto their kids. It happened with anti-Trump attitudes, with transgender-activism, gender-gaps, race-activism, etc. One side is accepted, and debate is silenced, and teachers are forced or encouraged to teach those things to impressionable young minds instead of encouraging free debate.
Further, if you ask most conservatives, they actively disagree with a lot of those things even if it's from the perspective of government-meddling. Conservatives are generally half the population, so something is definitely skewed and going wrong.
> The thing is that Google has absolutely gone down questionable path from their early days.
This is the price for being a public C-corp. There are very few people in history who can withstand the short term mob mentality of shareholders - in my mind only Jobs, Bezos, and Musk could do it... and survive. (imo Not even Bill Gates
or Edison could do it) Maybe for other companies this can be mitigated by becoming a B-corp instead i.e public benefit company
Sure, but is Google's motto still "don't be evil"?
They may be able to potentially wield a big stick, but what's its use when they'll never use it and push back? they've been strong armed by Wall St to the point where they've kowtow enough to drastically change Google in not so great ways. In their defense, very few people can do better
Why do you think Wall Street strong armed them into dropping the motto? Isn't it more likely that the people in charge simply changed their minds about the best way to run the company? And, given the lack of formal control, what mechanism did Wall Street use?
Are most leaders of publicly traded companies immune from wall st analyst quarterly estimates and projections? Do they not greatly affect the company's share price?
The leaders of most public companies are indeed influenced by analysts and investors. The reason is because the leaders of most publicly traded companies can be fired by the board, and the board's perception of leader performance is influenced by analyst opinions and the opinions of large and/or influential shareholders. In Google's case, Larry and Sergey hire and fire the board, not the other way around. There is a meaningful difference between the corporate governance dynamics at Google and most other public companies.
The thing is, these sort of situations (creating dependence) are very hard to pick apart and point out who is at fault.
Say an organization 'A' funds another organization 'B' (maybe non-profit, maybe not), and over time 'B' becomes very dependent on the donations they are getting from 'A'. Then say they start to have a conflict of interest, and 'A' drops funding(which probably kills 'B').
Who's the bad guy here? How should've 'B' known there might be a conflict of interest in the future if not immediately?
It's a simple issue, bar entities that should not have conflicts of interest from accepting gifts/investment/etc that could create a conflict of interest.
It is appalling how US senators are allowed to receive gifts or be compensated in creative ways by companies.
But we're talking about a think tank, right? It's a private group of people that write about their opinions. Why shouldn't they have conflicts of interest?
Or you can limit the percentage of funds you can get from certain types of entities in order to reduce or prevent dependence. My current employer (a research no profit) has this limitation in its basic rules
Isn't this, like, cynicism completely decoupled from reality? Google invests a lot of money and time in a myriad of projects with altruistic motivation. Google summer of code, $100 Million per year for non-profits, OSS releases such as tensorflow or Chrome, google.org and on and on.
Of course you can say that this is motivated by PR objectives. But then you're creating a situation where they couldn't do anything right.
Many of their regular products also straddle the border to altruism. Google Scholar doesn't seem to bring in much money, yet it's one of the most important tools for research. Electric, and self-drivings cars seem to be obvious wins for both the shareholder and humanity etc. etc.
They've also created the model for the modern workplace: rooted first and foremost in trusting people to do the right thing, and letting follow their interest to a degree previously only seen at Bell Labs and similar institutions of a lost era. And where Bell Labs was possible because Bell was raking an incredible amount of money, Google has turned the causality around: their free-wheeling embrace of creativity is seem the world 'round as a reason for their success.
Trains and evaluates young engineers either for them to hire or to work in their ecosystem
> $100 Million per year for non-profits
PR, taxes, and as the article describes, leverage.
> OSS releases
Giving things out for free helps pull everyone into your ecosystem.
> Of course you can say that this is motivated by PR objectives. But then you're creating a situation where they couldn't do anything right.
This is true. The only way for a company to be truly altruistic in a capitalist system is to be irrational: donate anonymously to organizations that oppose it, buy commercial time and then air white noise to block other groups from political ads. No company is going to do that (or if they do they won't last long).
There's no real solution that involves "tsk"ing at Google or trying to shame them into "doing the right thing". That has to come from outside.
At worst this looks like enlightened self-interest. You don't have to be a fan-boi to see there's there's a difference between Google and companies like Massey Energy (29 dead after flagrant safety violations [0]) and Enron (massive accounting fraud [1]). Making it a binary choice between altruistic/not erases any differences in corporate behavior when in fact there are practical distinctions with direct effects on the lives of employees, customers, and society at large.
> Research into self driving cars, on a closed platform, is a PR move.
Google has the largest contribution in advancing the state of the art in AI. That benefits humanity in many ways, SD cars being just one of them. They are also working on healthcare, robotics and reasoning agents. All these things will be a boon for humanity. Discoveries are discussed in the open.
Yes that's true, but that doesn't mean they're being performed with ulterior motives.
Whilst we can appreciate the benefits that have been brought forth, we shouldn't be blind to consequences both short and long term and potentially hidden.
A very blunt and hyperbolic analogy is giving infection ridden blankets to indigenous populations in the depths of winter.
> Google's motto was never "do no evil". Previously, it was "don't be evil"
They should probably use a motto that derives from Dungeons and Dragons' lawful/neutral/chaotic good/neutral/evil alignment system, just so we can be sure.
Google would be lawful evil whereas Uber would be chaotic evil.
In D&D's alignment system "evil" is close to "selfish".
A lawful-good company would try to promote better security for all users. A chaotic-good company would tank the search-rankings of anyone who didn't implement better security. A lawful-evil company would track your every move and offer an opt-out system. A chaotic-evil company would have the opt-out form do nothing.
I wasn't responding to the article. I was responding to fowlerpower's comment:
> The thing is that Google has absolutely gone down questionable path from their early days.
And as for the article, it says:
> The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999.
So yes, Google did contribute. But so did Schmidt and his family foundation. I think this is mostly on Schmidt personally rather than Google as a corporation.
I think they are indistinguishable here. Google and Schmidt both gave money, Schmidt is the executive chairman of google, so there's no distance between them.
It's pretty disingenuous to consider Schmidt's personal conduct and wealth as separate of Google. As Alphabet's board chairman, he's the third in charge of the company, and is usually the one conveying Google's political position to the leadership of various countries. And a significant portion of his wealth is either cash from Google or stock that's still invested in Google.
The primary difference in it being his personal action, is that there's a lot less regulation governing his use of it.
Google was fantastic and contributed greatly to breaking the iron grip Microsoft had on the industry. They also completely changed the way we use the Internet, pushed network and security technologies forward and to the end user, and made sure iPhone/iOS have a worthy competition in the smartphone market.
It is very sad that they went down the censorship path. Especially since the open web made Google Search a viable business in the first place.
Are you referring to http2? The binary standard they pushed to help them crawl better and make things less debugable for the rest of the network community that's mostly small entry developers?
Whatever may be happening now, this is super-revisionist history.
Google fought a large number of very lonely fights in the early dates, all in the name of consumers, the industry, and doing the right thing. It took a very large number of lumps and made a lot of enemies for doing so, but did it anyway.
I was there, in the DC office, working next to the policy director (I started the engineering side when he started the policy side. It started out as just the two of us).
I know what the strategy was, I know why it did it, because I was in the meetings to decide those strategies, and know what leadership wanted and approved.
What, precisely, is your source of information to contradict this?
Because it neither accords with history or reality, as far as i can tell.
(I left DC in 2012, so i can't speak to anything that happened afterwards)
I found Adwords for Domains a pretty questionable way to make money, as it subsidized the domain grabbing industry, and I find it hard to find the value for either advertisers or users that they otherwise claim for search ads.
I don't think your experience contradicts my comment. At the time, they thought that was something worthwhile for them to do. They definitely did a lot of things that helped their reputation in the past. Google could do no wrong. Then their priorities changed and they did different things.
I'd be wrong if Google actually went out of their way and did things that were contrary to their business interests.
So if you were there, please explain why google supports ALEC and conservative republican senators like Inhofe?
Google doesn't share anything in common with people like him, other than not wanting to be sued by the govt. When I was at Google, there was a lot of complaining about this support and no explanation.
Can anyone who needs to say 'don't be evil' really be trusted?
It betrays a certain disingeniousness, an implicit assumption of unaccountable power and a conscious decision to adopt a strategy of placating the public with platitudes up front and maybe doing something altogether different behind the scenes. Power always concentrates itself and does strange things to people.
Google, Facebook and a lot of the SV culture is beginning to look sinister, they don't seem grounded to human values and present a future vision that is cold, alienated, soulless and totalitarian in an techno-elitist way.
You can't wish away people, and unemployed people create instability and an unviable system. Whether it is robotics or AI and keeping aside whether these are possible in any realistic way, for the people who accept this the only way to keep the system stable will involve evil.
> Time and time again we are reminded why corporations will evolve to become as greedy and as protective of their turf expansive of their power and monopolistic as they can get, even if good people are running them.
Because if they didn't, they would be replaced by organizations (or people within the organization) who will. (I want to say that's Stanslaw Lem's law of bureaucracy?)
This would matter if think-tanks were independent academic research organizations. They aren't. They're basically mini-PACs or mini-ad agencies. You pay them to publish research that supports your corporate positions. That's how they make money.
Calling them "evil" is like calling a customer "evil".
I've never seen anything like the censoring by Google and Youtube over the last few weeks. Ron Paul of all people got all his videos demonetized for being "controversial". The most disgusting thing to me is that they don't delete the videos because they don't actually break any policies but they instead remove them from search and remove the ability to comment or share the videos, stifling any potential discussion.
I think the only reason people aren't yet as afraid of Google as they were Microsoft circa 1996-2000, is that Google has yet to fully flex its ability to abuse its monopoly (not to mention there are a few other equally powerful juggernaut companies roaming tech now). That appears to be starting to change. No question the anti-trust hearings come next, the DOJ will pursue them over the next five years.
The supposedly business friendly Republicans now view them as a left-wing enemy, so a party shield (regarding anti-trust intervention) will not exist going forward. Obama kept them from DOJ interest during his time in office because of how close they all were, that's also not likely to be seen again in a future Democrat administration. Should be easy to carve them into pieces, with search + adsense + adwords on one side, and one or two other companies getting everything else. The new Search Co would then be put under a ten year government dictated operational agreement that would limit some of its abusive behavior.
Let me see, the title reads "Open Markets Applauds X" where X is a court verdict against those who're funding the think tank that produced the article.
Regardless of the content of the article or the fairness of the court's decision, the title itself is inflammatory and nothing less than indicative of someone having a beef and thumbing their nose at Google.
The lack of self-awareness on part of whoever came up with that title is astounding.
I disagree that the title's author wasn't (self-)aware of Google being one of the think tank's sponsors; I think the author was indeed aware but somehow deluded themselves into thinking that the think tank could live up to the ideals of being truly independent while taking corporate funds.
What title do you suggest could have been less inflammatory but still convey the same message?
> I disagree that the title's author wasn't (self-)aware of Google being one of the think tank's sponsors; I think the author was indeed aware but somehow deluded themselves into thinking that the think tank could live up to the ideals of being truly independent while taking corporate funds.
Let me take it to an absurd extreme and suggest the following title:
"Google Lost and Can Go Suck My D"
Last I checked it still qualifies as "truly independent thinking".
> What title do you suggest could have been less inflammatory but still convey the same message?
Was something like "Open Markets and European Commission's Finding Regarding Google" too hard?
edit: nitpick, but "Finding Against X" sounds incorrect. Finding is about something, not for or against. Verdict could be for or against. Given the title itself, I don't exactly have high expectations about the quality of the article which I haven't read yet.
It's a think tank, not a newswire. It has policy positions and opinions. It's completely expected for them to write articles and titles applauding or "regretting" policy moves.
Applauding and regretting and whatnot are both leagues more respectful than your outlandish example.
Would you please stop posting inflammatory and uncivil comments to HN? Especially on divisive topics, where they act as flamebait.
We're hoping for a higher quality of discussion here and that requires maintaining a slightly artificial level of self-discipline when annoyed, regardless of what we're annoyed by.
I didn't say that, and you're (probably intentionally) misreading my post.
Your original complaint was that they insulted Google by taking a policy stance against them, and that they might as well have made a title regarding sex acts. I was telling you that is ridiculous.
The article doesn't even say that Schmidt called for the guy's head. It seems to have been the Foundation's decision. That's arguably a spineless move, but then again it's probably in their interest.
And what, exactly, would be ethically wrong about stopping funding for an institution you no longer agree with? After all, every single donation to charity is based on the principle that those giving agree with the organisations' aims. If the ACLU started a large campaign arguing for the extinction of puppies, would I be ethically wrong to quit?
If you want research isolated from such pressures, your best bet happens to be government, by the way. There are layers upon layers of isolation between the funding decision and actual scientists that, apart from the occasional right-wing propaganda misrepresenting individual projects, you're measured by the only yardstick that should count: how many papers you get into high impact journals.
Are you being oblivious on purpose? It strains credibility to think that Schmidt and Google didn't like a blog post by a think tank they funded generously to criticize them. I'm pretty confident they acted to get it taken down and wanted him gone. Suppose that wasn't the case, what conceivable reason would there before for kicking them out? The tank says: "it was a shared decision to kick them out". The other side: "they kicked us out because of this".
I'm not actually disagreeing with you. I just consider it somewhat possible that Schmidt simply complained, and the administrators got cold feet and made that decision. The people being fired are unlikely to know what Schmidt may or may not have discussed with the administration.
Anyway, that's not the point. The question is: why should someone not be allowed to change their funding decisions when the organisations they're funding go down a path they disagree with? Why should anybody be forced to continue to finance people after they've become the opposition.
Note also that Schmidt used to be the Chairman at this think tank, meaning that he is not just providing funding, but part of the academic community in its orbit, with a legitimate stake to disagree on the merits of the science.
A lot of people are calling these things Scams. People arent wrong and to a certain degree they do attract the "quick buck" type to them. Keep in mind though that these are also very useful for companies to get the Digitial Currency and block chain into the hands of the masses without some of this money, which large parts of that may be burned, will yield some killer apps.
The people doing an ICO do it to raise a bunch of money, much like a kick starter campaign. The people buying an ICO buy it for a quick buck and a lot of times they end up selling these coins from the ICO for 10x, see BATs.
The allure for people starting a company is that you can raise millions and give 0% of your company away. Some people will scam, it's true maybe a lot will, but some will undoubtedly start something big and will want to do more than just scam.
Call me when a single of these projects that raise a ton of money from ICOs actually delivers and becomes a success. So far we have seen a lot of no strings attached cash given away to people with just an idea who would never raise money from real investors. I think it's a ponzi scheme. As far as people selling ICO tokens for 10x price, only a small number of people can logically do that and it relies on influx of new buyers. Usually after listing of your token on exchange you get a fresh infusion of speculators and gamblers which allows the earliest investors to cash out but most people end up losing money.
Technically, I don't think you can call it a Ponzi scheme unless you're paying existing ICO owners with new, incoming ICO buyers' money. Coins sort of prevent that?
I think it's technically just fraud: they take your money, convert it into worthless acorns, then when nothing happens, the acorns can't be traded for any value.
Yes, perhaps. I think most people who "invest" in ICOs follow this logic:
1) Get into the ICO race and be quicker than others so you get tokens. There is always massive demand to participate in ICOs so most people aren't quick enough to get their transactions in.
2) Wait until the new worthless token is listed on some speculative exchange which allows trading of these tokens (Poloniex). In the meantime hype the token on social media like Reddit to increase FOMO. Once it's listed those people that didn't get into ICO will rush in to buy tokens as they anticipate the price to go up by 10x.
3) The ICO investors cash out their coins from this initial spike of new money rushing in after listing on exchange.
Ethereum raised 20000 Bitcoin giving away 2000 Ether per Bitcoin. Today, one Ether is worth 0.1 Bitcoin. That's a 200x return. Also, they created the most widely used Blockchain. Does that qualify as "delivered"?
Ethereum is interesting because it is basically a ponzi scheme which spawns new ponzi schemes (ICOs) on top of itself. I am only an observer of blockchain space (don't own any blockchain tokens) but afaik there isn't anything real aside from gambling apps and some prototypes hacked together for ICOs (without any real users) running on smart contracts.
So I think I wouldn't count such usage as it's all speculative until there is some mainstream application which actually uses smart contracts or public blockchain.
Most transactions on blockchains (Ethereum or Bitcoin) are just moving tokens between addresses on exchanges (either by bots or by gamblers who do it manually) or moving tokens to ICOs to create new tokens and then trading between different kind of tokens in order to gamble and hopefully make some money from it.
> The allure for people starting a company is that you can raise millions and give 0% of your company away. Some people will scam, it's true maybe a lot will, but some will undoubtedly start something big and will want to do more than just scam.
A system which enables scamming like that is a horribly broken system, and the occasional success story does nothing to change that fact.
Contrast this to an IPO, where you have to more or less lay all your cards on the table before you can sell your stuff to the public.
You can't "contrast this to an IPO". It's just 1000 times different. ICO are more like a seed round, accessible for everyone, not just VC firms.
Seed round are counter-intuitive / highly risked investments, like ICOs.
>A system which enables scamming like that is a horribly broken system
I agree, lots of people are going to get scammed, and the market/ the ICO structure is going to evolve, that's natural. People are already digging and you can already see very well documented due dilligence about ICOs.
I don't think it's a broken system, it's just a young system that is evolving quickly.
That's the point isn't it? A company is offering this to raise money but doesn't actually give anything away? Then where is the value coming from? It's all based on herd mentality and trying to buy the first ticket on the free money train. ICOs are pyramid schemes, the sad thing is that there's a bunch of smart, young internet types falling for it.
The answer is a little unfortunate, even though things are said to be worth $xxxxM market cap, but the depth of the market is so shallow that the true value is near zero.
Tesla ain't going nowhere. A lot of people are missing the point as to why the stock is so high.
It's so high because it's the future, not because of current sales. If it's the future then the argument needs to be a little different if your hoping to convince people to dump it.
It's clearly high because of what people believe about the future.
What remains to be seen is whether those beliefs are correct. It's not unheard of for stocks to.fly high because of what people believe the future will bring, and then to come down when that prediction turns out to be false.
Everyone working on JavaScript right now lives in a bubble. Take a look at how back end languages have evolved and that's your future, you can try to deny it but your going to go the way C did and Java did. You can cite openness and the web and all these other things that make some kind of sense but history is against you.
In reality those arguments don't hold water. In reality our field is 30 years+ old and there is some maturity in the way things are done. All this crazy shit of rewrite everything all the time will just eventually tire people out and people will cut this redo an entire framework just because out.
JavaScript is one of the most important languages around right now and pretty soon the adults are going to be taking it away from the kids. Just as an FYI, this is another example of that. Too many important decisions are happening without much thought about what's there already.
I don't know maybe I'm wrong and maybe this time will be different but I've been around long enough. I learned the ins and outs of angular only to be told "fuck that" shortly after. It all seems very wrong too me but maybe you can tell me otherwise?
This story is fascinating for tech people everywhere and we should all pay attention.
We all have big dreams of starting our own company some day (I know do) and many of us work for big corporations that would rather we never go anywhere and work for as little as possible. (admittedly the markets are forcing them to pay us a lot but they aren't doing it out of good will).
The outcome of this will teach us all very valuable lessons. I can't be the only one who is a little paranoid that if I start my own shit I'll be sued or that I may even be sued for some of the side projects I'm working on even though I've never taken any code or resources from my company.
> The outcome of this will teach us all very valuable lessons.
Lesson #1: Don't steal.
> I can't be the only one who is a little paranoid that if I start my own shit I'll be sued or that I may even be sued for some of the side projects I'm working on even though I've never taken any code or resources from my company.
Lesson #2: If someone accuses you of theft, deny it instead of pleading the fifth.
Assuming their accusations aren't truthful, of course.
> Lesson #2: If someone accuses you of theft, deny it instead of pleading the fifth.
Actually, you shouldn't say anything and get a lawyer. Then listen to them. Pleading the fifth is expressly not an admission of guilt however it is portrayed in the media - often times it is necessary even for innocent parties to invoke. I am not a lawyer and this shouldn't be construed as legal advice.
> Actually, you shouldn't say anything and get a lawyer
Which is exactly what Levandowski did. And then, under advice from his lawyer, he plead the fifth.
> Pleading the fifth is expressly not an admission of guilt
In criminal cases.
In civil cases, you can still plead the fifth without facing contempt. But the jury is free to draw its own conclusions. As is the judge. If you don't believe me, see the transcription of Alsup's tounge lashing.
> In civil cases, the jury is free to draw its own conclusions
Actually, in the US, whether or not the jury is free to draw negative inferences from invoking the fifth varies by which jurisdictions law controls (the feds have one set of rules, states each have their own, and their are rules for when state and federal issues are in play in the same case.)
And, in any case, there is a difference from a negative inferences drawn from your failure as a result of your agent's invocation of the Fifth (e.g., Uber based on Levandowski's actions) and a negative inference against you for your invocation of the Fifth.
Thanks for the clarification. I.e., the fifth itself doesn't protect you from negative inference in civil cases, but some jurisdictions provide that protection?
In any case, I stand by my lesson: avoid actions that lead to situations where these distinctions matter.
Sorry, but I don't buy it. Of course you should talk to lawyers first, just as Levandowski did.
But at some point, if you're truly innocent, I'm sure the best lawyers in the business could find a way for you to say "I'm not guilty" without hurting yourself.
> But at some point, if you're truly innocent, I'm sure the best lawyers in the business could find a way for you to say "I'm not guilty" without hurting yourself.
In a perfect world, being actually innocent would mean zero risk of conviction of a crime with a vigorous and dedicated defense, no matter what the prosecution did.
We don't live in a perfect world, and it is, in fact, quite possible for a situation to exist where you are actually innocent and on-balance have better expected results by invoking the Fifth.
Even accepting potential negative consequences that may have outside of the criminal realm.
But I have a hard time imagining a specific scenario where you're accused of IP theft and a lawyer can't find a way to say "my client is not guilty of IP theft" without compromising their client.
At the very least, at some point, the client is going to have to enter that "not guilty" plea.
> But I have a hard time imagining a specific scenario where you're accused of IP theft and a lawyer can't find a way to say "my client is not guilty of IP theft" without compromising their client.
Okay, how about where they actually physically have the documents that are the subject of the case, cooperating with discovery would reveal them, but they didn't actually use them in the new job or take them with intent, even though the other people accused alongside did actually steal smaller numbers of documents, and use them in the new job without your clients knowledge, so that your only real hope besides gambling on a jury's inferences of intent is that a criminal case is never initiated because your clients possession of the information doesn't come to light.
> At the very least, at some point, the client is going to have to enter that "not guilty" plea.
A plea is non-testimonial, does not open up cross examination, and does not open up threat of perjury. And, no, they don't have to do that if criminal charges are never filed, which is exactly what you are hoping for if you are invoking the Fifth in other circumstances because of potential future criminal prosecution.
My assumption is that intentionally copying IP onto a personal device and removing that device from the office -- regardless of any actual intent to use that data -- is still theft. Which would make the former employer's claims truthful.
It's super unclear to me how you would accidentally retain a copy digital documents...?
Like I said, it's hard to imagine this scenario actually happening. But for good measure:
Lesson #3: Leave work at work and startup at home.
I actually did something like this long ago (pre-2000) - emailed a set of detailed and very confidential sales spreadsheets to my personal email. It wasn't "theft" (and AFAIK nobody even noticed). It was so I could convert the spreadsheets to a proper Access database on my own time, since that's not what I was paid to do but it made my job a lot easier.
I would probably have been in a world of shit if anything came of it, though.
I've worked for employers who were 100% convinced this is theft, even without some intent to use that information, and even discussed very similar hypotehticals in on boarding.
Right, that's why I mentioned how long ago this was because very few employers were as Orwellian about this stuff as they are today. Calling it theft was hyperbole then and is hyperbole today.
I'm actually not sure it's theft. It might violate confidentiality agreements, and using those files outside the scope of the former employer might constitute unlawful use of trade secrets, but simply copying the files and bringing them home may not actually be a criminal act.
(I'm just putting this out there because I don't actually know, and hope someone else knows the answer. Not attempting to be authoritative.)
You can't selectively plea the fifth. You can't go into court, say things in your favor, and then clam up and plea the fifth when things get dicey for you. As soon as you start testifying in your defense you have waived the right and you'll be held in contempt if you take the fifth afterward. It would be unusual, but you can be imprisoned indefinitely without a trial/conviction until the judge decides to release you or you resolve the issue that put you in contempt.
This bit is different: Levandowski has not been charged with a crime. There is no plea, guilty or not guilty, for him to enter. He is not even the defendant in the civil suit.
He (or his lawyer) believes that talking about these documents could open him to criminal liability (whether he's guilty of anything or not), so he is choosing to remain silent.
Now, if other evidence is unearthed and Levandowski is indeed charged with a crime, and it made it to trial, that would be his time to enter in a plea of not guilty.
Right, things are a bit confused at the moment because the parent's hypothetical is so close to the case at hand.
I'm addressing parent's concrete hypothetical -- where the person accused of theft is the ceo of the company.
> that would be his time to enter in a plea of not guilty.
I think I'm wrong here, actually :)
dragonwriter provides a compelling explanation, elsewhere in this thread, for why entering a "not guilty" plea is very different from stating "I'm not guilty" outside the context of entering a plea.
> Lesson #2: If someone accuses you of theft, deny it instead of pleading the fifth
What is the clear benefit to denying rather than pleading the fifth? I know from Psychology that telling a jury to disregard information makes it seem more valuable and true, but that's more speculative than what you seem to have seen.
> What is the clear benefit to denying rather than pleading the fifth?
You open yourself up to perjury charges as well as the charges you were trying to protect against with the Fifth, plus you open yourself to unlimited cross-examination and impeachment of your testimony.
I think I see: You were comparing the GP to someone in Kalanick's position, not to Levandowski. I don't think Uber itself has pleaded the fifth - though they've made an argument related to pleading the fifth - so I misunderstood you.
I would hold off on taking any lessons at all until it's had a few years to work its way through the courts: News has the problem that outrage generates clicks and views. The question of "Should a company distance itself from executives accused of a crime by a competitor?" seems better served by referring to decades of case law, than by reacting to any news article.
If you work for a company, and you want to start a parallel project/business, some key points are:
a. Do not start a side project/business in the VERY same industry or about the VERY same product of your current employer (like in this case, Waymo/Otto/Uber).
b. Do not use IPs, code, equipments, facilities, etc of your current employer (like in this case)
c. Do not solicit most of your co-workers to quit and join you
d. Do not download documents from your employer, save them on personal storage and then resign abruptly from the company
I have started several other businesses while working at large companies - if you don't get anywhere close to a/b/c/d you should be very fine.
Related to (a), if you do want to start your side business in the same industry as your employer, you must clear it with them -- in writing -- first. Yes, there are many many situations where they will laugh and say "no", but you never know.
For example, I work at Twilio. Let's say I hypothetically have some ideas of things to build on top of Twilio that I could turn into a side business. Maybe these things are features that Twilio might want to build into the platform, or maybe not. If I wanted to start a side biz doing these things, it'd be in my best interests to clear it with Twilio first. They might say "that's out of the scope of anything we'd ever build into our product, so go ahead". Or not.
You don't want to find out several years later, when you're becoming successful, that your old employer has decided to stake a claim on what you're doing.
> We all have big dreams of starting our own company some day
Speak for yourself. I've got absolutely no dreams whatsoever in starting my own company. I go to work, do good work and put in my hours. I get paid nicely above average salary so that I have no particular concerns from a financial perspective. Why would I want the stress and hassle of running my own company?
This isn't really a gray area. He stole a bunch of documents on the way out, founded a new company based on IP he didn't own, and then sold it to another company. (assuming google's allegations are true)
Well, the evidence that Google has gathered to suggest that Levandowski did copy the documents and then tried to cover his tracks is pretty persuasive, so it might be safe to assume that part of it is true.
However, whether or not he used those documents in an inappropriate manner in Otto or Uber is still up for debate.
You forgot "and changed". Injected ads, injected JavaScript, replaced ads... This has been occurring, and without protections against it, it will continue to occur.
The article gives me anxiety. It gives me anxiety that people can be held at our borders for hours and sometimes days (in my country non the less). All because some junior border officer did not understand the visa type well enough. How can they not even apologize? How can they not even acknowledge these types of errors.
Will they do this to us when we travel abroad on a tourist visa?
These articles should have been written a decade ago. The media is being honest all of a sudden now that they don't like the government. These aren't new happenings.
Well, a lot of US people actually like it that foreigners are given a "special treatment". As I heard some respond to situations like this: Entering the United States is a privilege and not a right.
That's such an easy thing to say. People who are in US temporarily also need to rent apartments, rent/buy a car. Most of the H1B folks who are here for 3yrs don't live out of the bag for 3 yrs. If this attitude remains, the smart folks will avoid US entirely. You'll definitely see foreign companies competing and hurting the economy. Either you're with immigrants or against.
Edit - if people are uncertain about re-entry, how are they supposed to make daily decisions, as simple as leasing an apartment.
Will other countries begin to reciprocate? Will other countries/institutions begin demanding compensation for wrongful detention/deportations?
Perhaps my biggest concern is this: How long until this pushes someone over the edge? It's precisely this kind of persistent harassment that can convince an angry, disaffected young man that, yes, the system really is rigged against him.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that any country in the NATO umbrella being hit would lead to the United States retaliating decisively.
President trump would be advised by the generals he knows more than that he has to go in front of the American people and let them know why he has to take the actions he is taking. Sending US troops into Europe.
Believe me, there is zero doubt, if NATO is hit its game over. Why does Putin cry about NATO so much?
The history of my country (Poland) tells me that military alliances are worth shit when someone decides to call the bluff. The Second World War started with France and Britain failing to fulfil their obligations when Hitler invaded Poland. Somehow I don't expect NATO troops to show up if Russian forces cross the Polish-Ukrainian border.
They declared war and did nothing (hence names like Sitzkrieg or Phoney War). Since Polish defense strategy was based on assumption that UK and France will fulfill their obligations it was a much easier win for Germany than it could've been otherwise. I'm suprised it's not talked about more outside Poland, but this betrayal cost millions of lives.
What betrayal? The UK and France did go to war against Germany, but they were not in a position to invade Germany in 1939. France suffered more than 4 years of German occupation as a result of its decision to declare war on Germany, a pretty high price for honoring its obligations to Poland.
France did not honor it's obligations and if it wasn't in position to attack Germany then France shouldn't have made those guarantees (Maurice Gamelin's "bold relief offensive"). Thinking that Germany wouldn't have attacked France if war hadn't been declared is a bit naive.
I think the current situation with NATO is different than the alliances of WWII.
Lets say that Russia invades Europe. If NATO doesn't respond, then the alliance is null and everybody fights for themselves. Which isn't a good situation to be in, given that countries in Europe don't have the capacity to take on Russia by themselves, I mean given our experience from WWII.
We learn from mistakes and history teaches us that an invader will not be conservative about where to draw the line. The world also thought Germany will stop at Czechoslovakia too and they were wrong.
And nowadays we also have nuclear weapons and during the Cold War the presence of NATO troops in an area was enough to deter the advancement of the soviets and vice versa.
Russia can't (and doesn't want to) really "invade Europe". What they can do is effectively bring small parts of the baltics, perhaps a whole baltic state as a maximum, under the russian umbrella, and e.g. replace the government with a russian friendly one, put a military base or two there etc.
They don't have the resources to hold "unfriendly territory" (their economy is bad enough as it is). So what would happen is things that would confuse the international community. Fraudulent elections. Violence in the streets. Politicians and journalists murdered. And then suddenly that state is Russian friendly i.e. "effectively part of Russia".
What happened? Was it war? Was someone invaded? When? Is Article V invokable? Is Article V even written to cope with such a scenario? What if there was a proper democratic turn towards Russia? It's Ukraine all over again.
We can't expect (even with Trump) to see massive use of force just because a few green men are shouting in a square somewhere. Or because an election seems dubious in Riga. But wait long enough, and it's fait accompli. The Russian friendly government installed will reject any offerings of military help, because now you are asking the russians whether they want the russians out of the Baltics!
This is why the only working deterrent is to simply have massive Nato ground forces permanently in the Baltics. When you get Maidan square like things going on, you need OECD and NATO people on the ground already. They won't be admitted after a while.
Article V should be explicitly clarified to include e.g. holding elections without a long enough notice, and doing it without OECD and NATO oversight.
It would be a truly scary scenario either way. Vox explored a hypothetical invasion of Estonia [0], basically if military intervention happens both sides would be screwed (given that both sides will stick to their doctrine)
What the NATO expansion in Eastern Europe really did is that it disarmed these countries from their Warsaw-Pact era arsenal. We were forced to scrap a lot of missiles and reduce military personnel for a hypothetic defense from NATO.
Also, do you know what the UdSSR "ax theory" was? Or the "ed-escalation" strategy of the 90ies?
Look at the map. The Baltic states can't be defended. At least not with the military that is there in the moment. Could they be taken back? Unlikely because Russia would immediately retaliate tactically (nuclear).
That's why deterrence is the only thing working. If the US even suggests it might not consider an attack on Latvia the same as an attack on Washington, then there is no deterrent.
As you say, the Baltics can't be defended (at least not longer than 1-2 days) and there is no good strategy with Sweden and Finland outside NATO (Sweden accepts US use of bases - but would they in a crisis if Russia makes clear it will make Sweden a target?).
The government has already started to relax the ability for non accredited investors to invest in startups and that was under the last administration. These rules are recent but they are there, they are very limited though and ICOs blow the top off of those rules.
ICOs are forcing the SECs hand and I think it show cases the interest that exist in the public to get into these early stage startups. I won't be surprised if the rules are relaxed even further to legalize these types of coins even if they are considered securities, especially under this administration.
Everyone is saying that you are limiting yourself by offering an ICO. You are giving away zero equity for the promise that your product and service will offer these people something in most cases, that is just like a kickstarter. Furthermore, nothing stops you from raising money after the ICO.
Anyway, this is a fantastic new vehicle for startups and I believe it will absolutely change the game. The VCs are a little mad because they are being shut out of the best rounds, where they would normally get the most equity.
At the end of the day what matters most is if startups can start get funding and hire people and add value to the economy. That is what the SEC has to balance with the public interest on the other end.