Viewing profile — jval

People who can't do it will tell you that it can't be done :-)

Wow, this is excellent, congrats on the release. Are you planning on adding the ability for people to feed in suggestions/feedback or is that too prone to abuse? Great seeing more …

Sad thing about this article is that it is amazing, and yet the last thirty years has probably favoured well-credentialed people more so than any point in history. While there's an…

The problem with all of these graphs is that the rise of cloud players like Coinbase means that a lot (and I'd think probably most) of the Bitcoin transactions taking place these d…

1. Is money really speech? If so then there's a lot of laws that need to be overturned. Not to mention you can't hold 'free speech' up as a sword to swat away anything that affects…

The ancients used to select one of their own (sometimes even their own children) and periodically sacrifice them to the gods. The moderns instead periodically select one person and…

I feel like the UI should be consistent dang, because I've been flagging entire threads where there's an inappropriate comment (not knowing that there was a comment flag there). I …

People who put their money into Bitcoin without knowledge of the risks involved would have lost their money on a penny stock scam or a pyramid scheme if it weren't for this. You ca…

I agree with this, but I think it is still an extremely difficult problem to solve. Most of the political problems we have are low hanging fruit from a technical perspective, the t…

Unfortunately that's always a risk when you develop for FB or any platform. If it is bad for users (like most of the Zynga notifications were) or something they want to pursue them…

If you haven't already you should read his book, Avoiding the Fall, there are a number of prescriptions inside it on how to go about rebalancing the Chinese economy. It's really we…

I feel like this pissed you off a lot, but a lot of hiring in startups has nothing to do with people's competency, and more to do with culture fit which is generally totally out of…

What are the "hard" problems of driver and consumer mobile app and infrastructure/coverage? All the software in this business is commodity. The only real defensibility at work here…

Not saying it's impossible, just saying it's difficult and comparisons with other countries are not helpful in addressing those difficulties.

Sorry - edited my post to make clearer the fact that I'm not saying the US's healthcare system is good. I just think that comparisons with other countries are futile. My comment wa…

Politics is all about the money. Obviously administration is worse at scale too, but it comes down to political will in having the money to do it. The way you keep a political unio…

The problem is that the United States isn't a 'country' in the way the UK, or Denmark, or Australia is. The entire population of Denmark is 5.59 million, the size of a single secon…

It's sad to read stuff like this because Airbnb has enabled people like me to travel in a way I never could have previously. I travelled pre-Airbnb in Europe and was totally screwe…

You're right - the class of investor has shifted away from professionals and people wanting to leave China (the aspirational Chinese migrants we are used to) to extremely wealthy c…

Why are we all indebted to Assange? Nobody has any idea whether what he did had a net positive or negative affect on ours or other people's lives. There's doesn't appear to be a re…

I do think it has predictive power, in the narrow areas in which it can be applied. I think if you're a media executive and you've seen what's happened to the NYT, you know that ne…

You're right, it is an inductive assertion based off the quality of the piece and its focus, the author's profession and the author's background so I'm uncertain about that. I'm mo…

I don't disagree with you that disruption is often misapplied and mindlessly praised, I just think this article didn't do a good job of illustrating either of those points. I think…