"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.
They didn't need to; Hotmail offered free e-mail accounts which was unheard of at the time; Gmail went viral for offering 1GB of storage which was unheard of at the time. The latter also had scarcity with its invite system, I'm not sure if that helped make it more popular or not. Definitely helped prevent it from collapsing under its own success though.
Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something used by many that is now paid for free will become popular on its own.
That 1GB storage comes at a cost, which is basically a marketing cost. You give something away for free, in the hope it will generate word-of-mouth marketing. That free thing you're giving away is coming out of your marketing budget.
Gmail had plenty of marketing when it started: Both the '1 GB account' and the "Search don't Sort" snippet where heavily pushed through several marketing channels at the time (paid articles, Google search homepage, among others). Not all marketing is "ad banners". For example, all those Businesswire articles are pure marketing and advertising.
I'm too young to remember Hotmail launch but GMAIL did market. Their marketing investments were
1. Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition. I'd say they ate the costs of storage as marketing investment.
2. Viral invitation format -> exclusively perception
> Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition
Gmail's free storage was two orders of magnitude better than the competition. Nearly three orders of magnitude bigger than Hotmail. They launched with a gigabyte against Hotmail's 2 MB and Yahoo's 6 MB.
We're so used to not worrying about email storage anymore that it's easy to forget just how small they used to be.
I was quite young and things seemed shinier when I was young, so take this with a grain of salt. But I remember google differently. Gmail invites were a big deal, even amongst less technical people. Adding that sense of exclusivity to something they would use to advertise to us was remarkably smart.
In marketing there’s owned media, earned media, and paid media.
Google initially focused on the first two. They promoted new products like Gmail or Chrome on their search home page, and in the press. It worked well for them because they were already a newsworthy company with a lot of web traffic.
I say it can be very well all three. Just the groups involved are different.
It clearly is bubble with insane valuations for nothing on expectation of growth.
It is scam, due to wash trading and all other fun stuff. And fundamental way of trying to sell something worthless with implication that it will go up in value with rest of the bubble.
And yeah, point three is back to wash trading and laudering.
There's a lot of evidence that the inflows to NFTs are extremely small, and that the VAST majority of NFT sales are wash trades.
Why would anyone do this when the fees to trade are so high? Everyone thinks the end goal is to fake it until you make it, and sell the wash-traded pumped up tokens to an unsuspecting victim.
It's not.
The goal is to create fake wealth from nothing. There are banks now that will lend using NFTs as collateral.
You get millions of dollars in loans, then you spend millions, then you go bankrupt. Oopsie.
Step 3. Put ill gotten gains in the wallet in step 2.
Step 4. Purchase your own asset with money from step 3.
Step 5. Cash out.
Because there appears to be no reason behind the valuation of NFTs, it's pretty hard for the tax man to determine that "Oh hey, this doesn't look above board!". Because wallets are pretty easy to create and fund from all over the place, it makes the perfect mode to turn anonymous money into real money.
Oh, and bonus points, you still have the NFT, so see if you can't unload it on a rube for less money.
I am in similar position, but 45, negative net worth and alimony. I had two problems: environment (it should motivate better), and health (not 20 anymore, but still have shitty habits).
If you have $500, I would suggest to take 6 months sabbatical and just unplug from tech.
This feels like doctors recommending smoking in 1950ties! Maybe it is a survivor bias, weak cells die sooner, so only measured brain cells are super strong :)
Someone who has access to Pegasus is not going after finances. I had modest amount of ethereum on my PC, was hacked, but I still had control over my wallet.
If you have $1M+ it should not be tied to your sim card, GMail account etc... If you use the same device to access your bank accounts, and to browse internet or receive messages, you are like an idiot who does not do backups!
> If you use the same device to access your bank accounts, and to browse internet or receive messages, you are like an idiot who does not do backups!
Using ones phone for banking, internet, and sms is completely normal. Saying that 99.9999999999999999% of the world population that owns smartphones is an idiot isn't helpful.
The idiots are the governments of the world that haven't sanctioned Israel for allowing the continued trade of these cyberweapons by their citizens.
It's dangerous tossing that term around. There is enough real antisemitism in the world, and it's a real problem, we don't need to make-pretend extra. Critisism of the state of Israel does not equate antisemitism.
I don't doubt that some hide their hate behind that, but that does not mean that all critisism of Israel is "hidden antisemitism". Interpreting what peoples "real feelings" are from such a small post is pretty complicated, and since antisemitism is very serious you should not throw those accusations around easily. I can't see anything antisemitic in the post you called antisemitic. What is it actually you think was antisemitic about it?
> I don't doubt that some hide their hate behind that, but that does not mean that all critisism of Israel is "hidden antisemitism".
We agree. Reread my post and it should be clear as I write "too many", not "everyone" or anything like that.
> I can't see anything antisemitic in the post you called antisemitic. What is it actually you think was antisemitic about it?
I didn't say that. It was a response to the generic wording of that post. Edit: Above I replied to your reply to to throw8932894. Are you confusing me for throw8932894?
1. The state of Israel is the only state in the area where both Jews and Arabs are welcome and have a place in government and legislative bodies. Much of the "legitimate criticism" of Israel isn't directed at the Arabs in Israel it seems to I claim thinly veiled hate against the Jewish part of the population.
2. If one argues that it is against the Jewish part of the population because they dominate then one cannot say it is against the state of Israel only because then the difference doesn't mean anything.
Genuinely asking, my understanding is that Israel the government considers itself a primarily Jewish ethnostate with policies in place to evict Arabs from their lands in order to put Jewish people in there. My understanding is that this is where a lot of criticism and advocacy for Palestine comes from. In that case, in order to criticize the treatment of Palestinians, one would be criticizing a policy that benefits primarily the Jews of Israel. By this logic, it is antisimetic to point out human rights abuses that benefit Israeli Jewish citizens?
(I'm a layperson who isn't highly educated on this, and I'm aware that this conversation is complex and filled with nuance. I'm primarily asking to be educated about the matter based on the priors I have been told in the past.)
Remember that while I feel sorry for both parts I'm heavily biased so don't accept anything I write at face value but check it. On the other hand, unlike mainstream media and many who "support the Palestinian[1] cause" I'll be up front about it and ask you to verify yourself without referring you to more heavily biased sources.
> with policies in place to evict Arabs from their lands in order to put Jewish people in there.
I cannot defend everything Israel does but the last time I can remember there was a lot of fuzz on HN about evicting Arabs to give land to Israelis it was about giving back land to the families whos property was stolen and given to Arabs in the brief time where Jordan occupied it.
Also remember that there used to be a whole lot of Jews in the lands surrounding Israel. These partially moved voluntarily, partially where driven out harshly.
Meanwhile Arabs got to stay in Israel[2].
In fact more Jews were moved into Israel from surrounding countries than Arabs expelled from Israel so theoretically, if Arabs wanted, they could have given the properties of the Jews that fled from their countries to the Arabs that came from Israel.
That didn't happen as the Arabs never accepted UNs plan. So the neighbouring countries put their relatives in camps while waiting to "shove the Jews into the sea", Israel welcomed their own people and got them integrated with homes and a place to work. As time went by I think it became convenient to keep them there as a chess pawn.
[1]: I consequently use the word Arabs except here. There has never been a country named Palestine, just a Roman administrative province and later a fiction fueled by crafty journalists that saw that the story about small Israel against the Arab world would put Israel in a good light while "big" Israel (it is the size of a small county in Norway) against the poor "Palestinians"[3] in the camps.
[2]: Part of this seems to be a cynical plot by the Israelis. They asked them to stay I understand because if they all left, all the neighbouring countries could just walk in and shoot everything that lived.
[3]: Actually Arabs, just living inside the borders of the small part that UN/UK gave to the Jewish part of the population.
PS: Again, I'm heavily biased. I write to make you see it from my side. I have been caught in factual errors before. When that happen and I can verify it I have apologized and I try to not repeat those mistakes, again unlike mainstream journalists.
Govt of Israel has sure power over NSO operations.
>A yearlong Times investigation, including dozens of interviews with government officials, leaders of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, cyberweapons experts, business executives and privacy activists in a dozen countries, shows how Israel’s ability to approve or deny access to NSO’s cyberweapons has become entangled with its diplomacy. Countries like Mexico and Panama have shifted their positions toward Israel in key votes at the United Nations after winning access to Pegasus. [1]
2FA is a good option for securing your centralized accounts. But unfortunately, if you're logged in on your phone and your phone is hacked, well, it's still game over.
For crypto currencies it may help to store them on a hardware wallet, since accessing your money will require explicit interaction. But, as far as I understand (please correct me, not up to date with the security mechanisms of hardware wallets), if your computer is compromised while doing it, you can still lose it.
Just for people who don’t know, it’s shows relevant data regarding the transaction: Sum, currency, target address.
Now, if you verify that data, you are safe… if the original address was correct. But as we are talking about a sophisticated targeted attack, where did you get the original address from? Because if it was your phone or your computer, we are back to step one, as that might already be manipulated.
The advantage of centralized services tied to your clear identity is that they do some diligence to ensure the person accessing your account is actually you. You (often) even have a reasonable recourse to undo things that have been done fraudulently.
It’s regular government employees who get access to Pegasus. I’d be shocked if it had never been used in an unauthorized manner for straight up financial crimes.
> The price of my prescription without insurance was $339 per vial of insulin
In most countries insulin price is around $30. I remember it was cheap in US too.
Seems like another problem created by US kleptocracy. Make something prohibitively expensive, and "solve" problem by providing handouts to cover costs.
You are comparing an insured price to a cash list price (most of which does not go to the pharma co and a price which effectively nobody pays). As an insured American, I would pay 0$ for insulin.
False. 5 doses of Novorapid insulin (first one I found on Google) is 22.07 EUR in France. After the public insurance scheme, that's 7.72 EUR (or 2.20 EUR in my region). And then you can get further reimbursement from the employer's (or your own) private insurance.
Edit: I just remembered that diabetes is recognised as a long term condition, so you would be 100% reimbursed by the public insurance scheme.
No, cash list price of insulin in most countries is around $30. As uninsured person you can still buy insulin for this price in Mexico or order it from India.
That's not really a good counterpoint if the non-insured prices are patently insane. How on Earth is it justifiable for insulin to cost 300 dollars? Here it seems to be around 20-40 euros before the deduction you will get from our national health bureau (which can vary from 0% to 100% depending on your diagnosis and the medication you need.)
On top of the national mandatory health insurance, there's also optional private health insurance and private hospitals and such, but even for those the prices are nowhere near the insane numbers I see whenever US healthcare is discussed, and I frankly can't understand how people aren't revolting over there.
Didn't look that closely; there seems to be variance depending on how large an individual dose is and how many doses are included. I suppose the "price of insulin" is ill-defined without mentioning the dosage.
Considering China keeps shipping toys to the US with high lead levels, I wouldn't be surprised if they make lead paint for domestic use. I have no interest in looking up how, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was easy to find the recipe for lead paint and make it in your garage. I have read enough about making homemade finish to think anyone who gets the recipe - including passed down over generations by people living in mud huts - can make it.
true! But yes, it is. This map shows a summary of tests of paints on the market: https://ipen.org/projects/eliminating-lead-paint/lead-levels...
(These are studies of oil-based paints, rather than water-based paints which don't usually contain lead, but in LEEP's experience from Malawi and Liberia lots of homes are painted with oil-based paints, inside and out)
I suspect that even though you can get leaded paint in those places few are actually using it for residential stuff. Lead offered cheap durability for paints in fairly demanding applications. Stuff like a business sign that needs to look crisp after many years in the weather and UV or machinery that's constantly getting scratches up by whatever that machinery works with are the use cases where lead is still somewhat missed because the equivalent performing unleaded coatings are fairly expensive. Since those are poor countries it stands to reason that most of their residential oil paint use would be cheap unleaded stuff and their leaded paint use would be confined to applications that demand better paint than the low end unleaded oil based stuff but where they can't afford high-performing unleaded stuff.
We've done surveys and tested household use paints in five LMICs (https://leadelimination.org/projects/)(https://leadeliminati....
1) lead paints are often cheaper than unleaded paints (in LMICs) because lead paints tend to be locally manufactured and unleaded paints often imported. Also, lead pigments are often cheaper than lead-free pigments.
2) Yes, lead is good at making durable oil-based paints - in some countries with sub-tropical climates durable oil-based paint is popular on the inside and outside of homes, presumably for this reason. It's also easy to clean
3) Water-based paints are much less likely to contain lead and these are also used in homes in LMICs
it's only expensive to fix if you don't account for the cost of not fixing it. fixing this more than pays for itself in terms of reduced healthcare and prison costs
