Disqus - Latest Comments for tmcmh

Re: Let’s Face It, ‘Home Rule’ on Speed Cameras is Dead — Blame Focuses on City Hall

Tom Hughes — Thu, 12 May 2022 09:44:45 -0000

God forbid that lawbreakers should be caught for breaking the law (and putting other people's lives in danger).

Re: Personal Update: Rage Against the Dying of the Light

Tom Hughes — Wed, 11 May 2022 08:00:35 -0000

Fighting for democracy is hard, the more so in a country like ours with 330 million citizens. The temptation to tune out is ever-present. But many urgent battles are fought at state and local levels and these feel much more accessible, to me at least. For instance, though I live in NYC, I know that Wisconsin is a critical state, where gerrymandering and voter suppression have tilted the playing field away from Democratic Party candidates even though they have a statewide majority. So I support the Wisconsin Democrats in campaigns for the state assembly and senate — even if they can’t get a majority there they can prevent a super-majority for the other side.

Re: CYCLE OF RAGE: City’s New Chart Doesn’t Help Us Visualize the Same Old Problem with Cars

Tom Hughes — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 14:59:54 -0000

Yes, but the growth in number of cars reflects a policy failure; no city can flourish if the number of cars grows as fast as the number of people.

Re: City Will Extend Clean Curbs Program to All Boroughs

Tom Hughes — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 11:36:08 -0000

In the Financial District, where the sidewalks are narrower because of the colonial street grid, it would be a huge improvement just to move the mounds of garbage into the street, losing a few parking spaces (which are always occupied by placard-posted cars anyway) in favor of room for pedestrians. Instead of bins, just demarcating where the trash goes with low barriers, the kind that give some protection to bike lanes, would keep cars out and show where the trash goes.

Re: New York City Has Once Again Defied the Doomsayers. Here's Why.

Tom Hughes — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 15:13:01 -0000

Those are New Yorkers coming to pay last respects to their departed Florida friends and relatives, I'm afraid. https://datagraver.com/coro...

Re: null

Tom Hughes — Mon, 10 May 2021 15:35:41 -0000

This is a good start but what would be really helpful would be pre-packaged connections to various 3rd party data feeds and services; the customer would provide the credentials, AWS would hold the data. In my mind that's the truly undifferentiated work that's done over and over.

Re: - Gothamist

Tom Hughes — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 17:58:20 -0000

Bitcoin is mined in faraway places like Mongolia where energy is cheap and/or wasted (e.g., hydropower generated beyond what the adjacent grid can use). No big city will ever compete on the basis of lowest-cost power! That's just dumb. Cities don't grow a lot of sorghum, either. To the extent that Bitcoin (or Ethereum or dogecoin or whatever) becomes an asset class and/or a genuine means of exchange, it will fit right into the existing big-city matrix of services around finance, law, accounting, credit rating etc.

Re: Welcome to the Government-IT Infrastructure Complex

Tom Hughes — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 10:21:43 -0000

A critical discussion, thank you Albert. Social media, like legacy media, has standards ("Terms of Service") and a spotty record of enforcement decisions. The difference is that social media appear to be winner-take-most businesses, which gives those decisions extraordinary weight. Meanwhile, those businesses are extracting monopoly profits from their real customers, the advertisers.

The U.S. has seen this before and successfully dealt with it using antitrust law -- something invented in the previous Gilded Age and highly relevant now. The new technologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- railroads, oil, steel, telegraphy -- gave rise to giant combinations that used their dominant positions to squelch competition, buy off politicians and crush unions. But federal antitrust law broke up the big monopolies like the Standard Oil Trust and gave us an economy of unrivalled vibrancy and resilience. The breakup of Ma Bell gave us the modern telecommunications environment.

Every service provider should have rules -- you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater or throw food in a restaurant. Media are no different -- and competing media companies can compete along many dimensions, including the character of those rules, how they are drawn up and how they are enforced. (The bond-rating industry is a good example of this in practice; the rules are how they try to mitigate the conflicts inherent in that business.)

Competition is no cure-all (it seems to have failed utterly in healthcare). But in the great majority of industries, competition and sensible regulation have made the U.S. the richest of the big economies and the biggest of the rich economies. It's time to bring competition to social media and search, and it will only happen with antitrust enforcement.

Re: Innovation Upends Extrapolation: Urbanization

Tom Hughes — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 18:57:45 -0000

The pandemic is accelerating many trends that were already baked into our future: e-commerce hollowing out big-box retail and malls, work-from-home restructuring white-collar employment, and online banking / digital payments upending traditional financial transactions; telemedicine replacing much routine medical care.

Urbanization accompanied two massive shifts in economic activity over the last 150 years: from farm to factory and from factory to office. It relied on some major technological breakthroughs like electrification, railroads, internal combustion and elevators. In both those shifts, however, the underlying need was for "coordination" -- the requirement of certain kinds of enterprise that they coordinate the work of increasing numbers of people. The best way (the only way, until recently) to accomplish that coordination was to get them in close physical proximity to one another and to capital assets that made them more productive -- whether those were iron smelters, assembly lines or just conference rooms and copiers (remember those monster copiers? I haven't seen one in years...)

So the big question is: will coordination in future still require physical proximity, or will some enterprises be able to coordinate successfully while their employees work remotely? When you think of it like this, it seems clear to me that some enterprises / industries will to "go remote" more easily, and more completely, than others. Also, some job categories and departments will be more remote-capable than others.

Perhaps more interestingly, though, and more problematic, is the readiness of the worker to go remote. Is a twenty-something sharing a 3-bedroom apartment with 5 roommates as ready to work remotely as a mid-career homeowner who can make her spare bedroom a home office? When everyone came in to work, the corporate employer could regard the difference between those two employees as irrelevant -- a private matter. Is that still going to make sense when "on the job" no longer means "at the office?" And, even if the employer can successfully ignore those issues, can they ignore the risk that the twenty-something might not be building the skills and contacts that the mid-career professional built back when everyone worked physically together? Will work-from-home hollow out the employer's stockpile of soft skills and latent knowledge of "how things work?"

All of this argues -- and maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part -- for the evolution of cities from places of economic coordination (the original impulse that pulled people from farmlands to factories and offices) to places of "cultural coordination" and cross-pollination. Training and education seem to require more in-person enrichment than, say, programming or market research. Telemedicine and electronic health records make some tasks easier but remote-only doctor-patient interaction would lower overall care quality. Entertainment and leisure will never just be Netflix and Fortnite.

And these hopeful possibilities also illustrate a big risk: that "mass education" and "affordable care" become lower-quality, remote-only experiences, and high-quality education, high-impact entertainment and first-tier in-person medical care become accessible only to the few. There's a possible "Hunger Games" future where only the elite enjoy urban living, and the masses are banished to rural squalor, their only connection to society being their internet connection and not the shared sidewalks of a great city.

Re: Judd Gregg: The coming Biden coup

Tom Hughes — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 14:56:13 -0000

Anti-fa appears to be largely a hoax, similar to the "migrant caravans." It's an old playbook. Victor Orban does it in Hungary too -- hordes of supposed Muslims who just don't exist. Guys running around brandishing guns -- that's the right wing (Michigan, St. Louis, or the White House -- even shaming a serving general, who at least apologized for being used as a prop by a guy who doesn't even know how to hold a Bible).

Re: Judd Gregg: The coming Biden coup

Tom Hughes — Mon, 06 Jul 2020 14:34:09 -0000

Biden knows he has to be a centrist to win the Senate; can't get anything done if #MoscowMitch is still up there. So that rules out the loony left, which is almost entirely a fantasy of the right wing anyway. This article is just an excuse to flog some Nixon-era "they are all flag-burners" nonsense. The dangerous, destroy-America types are overwhelming on the Right. And people like Judd Gregg here are trying to hide that.

Re: Gateways

Tom Hughes — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 11:56:30 -0000

I certainly didn't see that DVDs were the gateway to streaming movies and TV. Netflix did, and by distributing DVDs by mail, they started an OK-seeming business that gave them a big head start on streaming, since they already knew the prospects most interested in on-demand at-home video.

Re: Tumblr

Tom Hughes — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 08:47:31 -0000

This reminds me that the first social network coulda/shoulda been Flickr. They had it all -- comments, sharing, grouping, all photo-centric. Yahoo ruined them too, mostly by not investing.

Re: Reply Spam

Tom Hughes — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 13:31:04 -0000

How does Stack Overflow do it? I can't remember the last time I saw a spam comment there.

Re: Decentralized Finance

Tom Hughes — Thu, 14 Mar 2019 13:18:08 -0000

Well... in institutional finance (a.k.a. capital markets) there is a great deal of self-regulation: parties agree on standards (like the standard swaps contract promulgated by ISDA, or the CUSIP Bureau) and government regulators leave it pretty much alone. So the regulatory barriers are less high in general, within that constrained space, because there's a reasonable assumption that these are mature institutions capable of looking out for themselves. The regulators look more at the properties of the institutions overall (like leverage and asset quality) rather than the minutiae of how they transact.

Given their greater freedom to maneuver, lots of institutions are looking at blockchain solutions not because they will upend the status quo, but just because it may be an easier way to get some things done that are long-standing annoyances: know-your-customer compliance, continuous settlement, things like that.

Re: Capitalism and Inequality

Tom Hughes — Wed, 23 Jan 2019 10:43:39 -0000

Putting Fred's thought another way: there should be no limit on the economic upside of success, but there should be a downside limit; we should help people stay above a threshold level of deprivation. Can a society call itself "moral" if it allows so many people to live below subsistence level, unable to house themselves, feed themselves, access medical care or education?

Re: Guest Commenting Has Been Suspended

Tom Hughes — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 11:01:48 -0000

In some settings and venues, yes. But other sites should be able to provide and even guarantee anonymity: sites that host dissenting and controversial opinions. We have conversational solutions like Signal and WhatsApp that protect speech, but we don't have venues that can really do that.

Re: Guest Commenting Has Been Suspended

Tom Hughes — Thu, 27 Dec 2018 10:58:58 -0000

The choice to close guest comments is a timely reminder that technology has still not made progress in systems of credentialing -- that is, systems that combine identity assurance ("you are who you say you are, and you're a person, not a program") with some threshold test of character (trickier -- "you're prepared to conduct yourself according to the rules of this venue, and your reputation suggests you will"). It's the lack of such a solution that let the Russians throw the 2016 election to Trump. China is moving ahead with "social credit" but, at least as they seem poised to apply it, it's more a recipe for more inequality and more authoritarianism.

To make it more complicated, a full solution would also allow anonymity, at least at the option of the venue convener; that's going to be important for sites that host dissenting and controversial opinions. It seems to me there is a blockchain application to be built here.

Re: The NYC Transit Mess

Tom Hughes — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 09:51:00 -0000

I realize this is a pipedream but there's a great blockchain opportunity here, to provide a paid-for public service (controlling congestion) with assured payment (no cheating) and anonymity for the user (the traffic authorities collect the money but don't know from whom).

Re: The NYC Transit Mess

Tom Hughes — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 09:29:01 -0000

I don't know the internals of Singapore's road-pricing technology but the equivalent in New York City, which is much more recently installed, is not too ugly as street furniture goes. It works on all vehicles, you get a discount if you have an EZPass tag in your car. It does use flashing lights to take pictures of passing license plates -- not an issue at, say, a tunnel entrance, but could be an issue if the sensors are installed on the streets of Manhattan, near to apartments and office buildings.

Re: The Pitch Meeting Setup

Tom Hughes — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 08:25:55 -0000

I don't believe in being un-welcoming or "making it hard" for any presenter; but I do note when someone, scheduling a meeting to occupy an hour of my time and theirs, then fails to plan simple logistics in advance. It's rude to be late to a meeting; it's also rude to show up "on time" but then spend ten minutes fiddling with dongles and whatnot.

My theory on why this happens as often as it does is that the familiar etiquette of, say, home hospitality doesn't fully work when carried over to business. If you invite someone to your home it's reasonable for you as host to make arrangements (food, drink, hang up their coats, whatever). That's basic etiquette and clear in advance to both host and visitor. But in a business setting, you may be "hosting" the meeting (it's in your office) but much of the agenda, as well as the vehicle for a demo / presentation, is necessarily set by the visiting presenter. So the familiar social etiquette doesn't operate as readily, and there's not much of a convention to fall back on.

Re: Feature Friday: Gmail Predictive Typing

Tom Hughes — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 11:50:42 -0000

I find the feature prompting me in ways I didn't expect: I kind of resent its predictions (am I so predictable?) so when I see a proposed word or phrase I ask myself, "am I giving this reply the attention it deserves?" And if I am, I then ask myself, "is there a way to express my reply that indicates that I really have thought through what I am saying, or will it be experienced as rote?"

Re: Taxation Of Carried Interest

Tom Hughes — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 11:12:01 -0000

Fred's original post distinguished between GPs investing alongside LPs -- clearly that is capital at risk -- and GPs acting in their role as managers. In that second role, the position of a GP is akin to the role of a manager in a conventional stockholder-owned company, who gets a salary and, if they do well at that job, a bonus in the form of equity. The former is treated as current income, the latter is taxed as capital gain on sale. I'm not sure I see the risk accruing to the GP in that second role: they know they will get paid along the way. If they were subject to clawback if the fund didn't return more than its original investment, then it would truly be risky. In effect the fees would be borrowing against future gains; but that doesn't happen that I've heard of.

Re: Taxation Of Carried Interest

Tom Hughes — Wed, 06 Jun 2018 09:22:06 -0000

The counter-arguments, as I understand them, are two. (1) is that private-investment managers (VC, private equity, hedge funds) are ultimately paid out of capital gains and that the fees they receive along the way are more about smoothing irregular cash flows; in the end, they're evaluated on, and paid from the proceeds of, asset sales. Argument (2), which Fred alluded to a bit, is that these firms -- VC most of all -- support innovation and risk taking.

I happen to agree with Fred that the favorable tax treatment should extend only to capital directly at risk, but the counter-arguments do have some merit. There's a tendency (followed by Trump during his campaign and then reversed in office) to talk about this as some kind of fat-cat favor. I don't think that's fair.

Re: Trump, Irrationality and Game Theory

Tom Hughes — Sat, 28 Apr 2018 15:09:51 -0000

It's much too early in the long game of the two Koreas to say if Trump's approach will do any better than, say, Bill Clinton's. A competing explanation for Kim Jong Un's recent acts is that (after murdering, among many others, his uncle) he now feels sufficiently secure, internally, to do what he knows must be done, which is to open up NK to the world in some graduated fashion. He was educated in Switzerland, he knows that his country's current situation is unsustainable in the long haul. He may be hoping for a transition into something like Azerbaijan or Kazakhstan, where a ruling kleptocratic elite holds the power but the general economy limps forward enough to prevent outright civil war.

One of the reasons I'm suspicious of the irrational-actor theory to describe Trump here, or to describe NK's reading of Trump, is that -- to the Kim dynasty -- Trump looks like just another (rational) western imperialist. The things that so many find appalling about Trump (disdain for democracy and the rule of law, the Constitution, individual freedom, personal dignity, family, etc.) don't look so remarkable, let alone crazy, from across the DMZ.