My dad just texted me today asking if I owned bitcoin and if he should pick some up. I described it as uninsured highly volatile fine art(can be destroyed/lost) with a huge counter-party risk if he doesn't have the technical ability to store his own coins. Does anyone out there have a better analogy to scare family/friends away from it?
My sister told me she bought some and that she’ll buy more soon. She also told me that the price will rise and rise. I’m not sure what to say, I’m totally stunned. But I guess that is an interesting signal showing that the pool of people who could potentially buy more and thus drive the price is tremendously big.
Why are you trying to scare them? Just explain to them that it is high risk.
But there is a strong potential future for btc, and in spite of all the fear mongering, BTC has so far come back from every crash. You're not just throwing away money if you spend a couple hundred of your otherwise disposable income on some btc. Buying at any point in the past would have yielded a payoff today.
Can people elaborate why they are downvoting this? I hold a similar opinion - as long as your other investment instruments are intelligently diversified and filled-out, why not spend a small % on bitcoin? As nnfy has said, any amount in the past would have yielded payoff today.
"But a crash!" is not an argument alone. Every single other investment instrument I'm aware of has had a crash.
Investing in Bitcoin to diversify is fine. Buying Bitcoin because it's been rising? That's the definition of speculation. Most people are not qualified to be speculators because they are insufficiently critical. It's easy to imagine potential, and difficult to gauge risk. See also "most investors lose money".
When I say "scaring them" I mean "explaining the high risk well". My words were imprecise, but are not at odds with your suggestion, except that I don't explain the potential benefits and strong future. That's for them to find out, I just want to make sure they understand the risks because it doesn't seem well shared at this point.
As a business owner whose entire revenue comes from adwords leads at this point, I can tell you it isn't a massively inflated cost. Sure, it's 90% of my expenses and half of what I even make, but I pay this because I still make money.
This may not apply to all types of ads, but I'm happy paying what I do, and I can't imagine anyone else would be paying if they weren't making money.
I'm having trouble reconciling him showing Amazon as the lowest spender by far of the three with their place as largest player by far. Are they just tremendously more efficient? I wouldn't imagine so given they're all essentially renting out a physical resource to their customers. Maybe I misunderstood something about the article?
I use Convox (http://www.convox.com). It is backed by ECS which gets me out of the infrastructure game for the most part and the CLI interactions in Convox are similar to heroku style commands so the learning curve is much simpler than deploying and learning my own Kubernetes or OpenStack or ECS configurations. They've also thought of the other things you need like environment based secrets(uses DynamoDB and KMS behind the scenes), as well as external load balancing, TLS, RDS integrations and more with single simple commands.
They also have CI/CD out of the box and builds can be triggered in your existing cluster with a 'convox build' or triggered on pushes to your private github repos.
Overall, unless you have a team that actually sees benefit in managing your own container and cluster manager(you better be big), id recommend embracing Convox, or something like it. The complexity still exposed by Kubernetes, OpenStack or ECS is still significant.
Seconding Convox. It's also worth noting that the tooling is open-source, and they profit off an optional-to-use closed-source web interface which has free and paid tiers.
I'm one of two developers at a very young startup, and the one responsible for backend + devops stuff. I simply don't have the time to learn a more complex tool like Kubernetes (not that I didn't consider it) while also working on the actual product. Its simplicity has been a bit limiting on occasion, but they're happy to accept PRs for well thought out changes. I recently had a PR merged regarding UDP ports and ELBs that should make microservice architectures much easier and cheaper to implement.
As a licensed insurance agent and tech person working in insurance, this sort of law is common and is a big part of the ethics portion of the licensing exam. I honestly don't think it applies here, but I could see how it could be justified.
Mostly it's to prevent brokers from giving customers kickbacks (either pure money or gifts). When a broker is helping people make decisions about what plans to buy, it seems like a reasonable restriction, although I don't think the intent was to prevent what Zenefits is doing.
Kickbacks just means "charging customers less money" and "giving customers a better deal than their competitors" and "competing in the free market".
The insurance industry is so messed up that they have made it illegal to give customers good deals and have made it illegal to compete.
Imagine that a bunch of companies got together and decided that everyone should increase their prices. In the normal world that would be called illegal monopolistic pricing. In the insurance world, charging people less money and giving consumers a good deal is the illegal thing.
Kickbacks (especially in the form of gifts) often go to the individuals rather than the company.
A broker who gives a 10% discount to a company saves the company money which allows them to get their employees a better plan (or higher profits or whatever).
A kickback of steak dinners and free golf for the HR manager is more like a bribe: no benefit accrues to the company itself.
Insurance prices are often approved by state regulators. It requires approvals and the state provides backstops and other safeguards. Prices in the insurance industry are pretty controlled. This even goes so far that despite there being a state backstop to many forms of insurance, a broker or agent aren't allowed to even mention this safety net without violating ethics laws. As for "why", I'm not completely sure. My guess here is it's to minimize the chance of the state needing to get involved with bailouts and to reduce competition so that companies don't take on unreasonable risk playing the odds that they'll make it through another year on the happy path without paying claims.
Honest question. Why is charging consumers higher prices the "ethical" thing to do? Giving "kickbacks" is just another word for "charging customers less money".
Is the issuance industry so messed up that choosing to not screw over consumers is considered "unethical".
The health insurance industry is heavily regulated. Typically regulation begets more regulation, it's conceivable that they've limited insurance cos in such a way that the inducement restriction for brokers makes sense.
You definitely want insurance companies competing on price, but you may not want insurance brokers arbitrarily giving out rebates.
Imagine (and this is totally made up) that the insurance companies give brokers higher commissions at higher volumes; if that were the case, and brokers could give rebates, there are times a broker would push one insurance company's plan over another's simply to hit a sales incentive. That's probably not good for the people buying insurance. Part of the broker's job is to give good advice.
In the retail world, there's now far, far less corruption than there used to be. When buyers from Home Depot came to visit my employer, they wouldn't even accept a soda because there was a strict, zero tolerance, no receiving anything from a manufacturer policy.
This was driven initially by Walmart, which has a similar policy, because executives at Walmart realized that if manufacturers were bribing their buyers, the cost of those kickbacks was being built back into the price of the product. By loudly (and actually) having and enforcing a "no taking anything" policy, they could then demand further price reductions. This is now widespread.
A broker offering kickbacks or discounts is recouping the cost somewhere. If the product is the same but they're cheaper by the broker, then it's likely that the product isn't the same in fact--perhaps there's some special rider in the contract, or maybe the broker just knows how to slow-walk or otherwise chip away at claims. The insurance industry is famous for some parties failing to provide the future service you're purchasing on technicalities or just bureaucratic abuse.
In a market where expert assistance is needed, and end users can't fully protect themselves with informed purchasing, requiring parties offering the same service to charge the same price is a way of forcing honest dealing. That's the idea, anyway.
Insurance itself isn't a consumer-friendly product without regulation. It's too easy to make a lot of sales and just disappear when the going gets tough. One bad player can run all the good ones out of business by out-"competing" them. I wouldn't be surprised if there are similar games to play in the insurance broker business but I'm not sure how it's done.
Wouldn't it make more sense to impose a capital requirement, like on banks? E:g. if you're insuring for $X in total value, you need to at least keep $Y in a fund.
As a heavy grpc user, I don't think ALB supports it due to a lack of trailer support. You're probably going to just use a TCP load balancer if you want grpc services behind a load balancer.
I started programming around the beginning of high school and then stopped at the end of high school and became a car salesman. 8 years later I went back to school and got a CS degree and am thriving. So, I did have some early experience, but given the gap I feel like I'm more closely aligned with a late starter.
It saddens me that this is the top comment. It's complete and total FUD unrelated in any way to what Proto is, and to boot, it's an optional type, provided if you want it, but otherwise not forced to be used in any way! Scroll down the page for much more worthwhile discussions of Proto.
