Home computers were still pretty rare when I was a kid. We had an Apple ][c and I can't think of many other families that did back then. It was too expensive to reach 1/3 of households.
The internet really was after I was grown. I didn't have an email account until I was twenty one or so and home internet was a couple of years later.
I think most of the kids I grew up with (I'm 47, so definitely Gen X) had a computer in the home, although it was usually a Sinclair Spectrum, a Commodore 64, or a BBC Micro. Although I suppose most of us didn't have one in the house until we were about 14 or 15.
No internet in (my) home until I was about 26, though (and was already working for an internet company).
I can remember playing electronic football on a vibrating metal table, then on a little screen with red dashes, and then on an Atari with blocky players. Then I stopped playing electronic football, but I hear the graphics are improved.
I think we got the Apple for Christmas in 1984, so I was 13, which the internet tells me cost the equivalent of $3,100 in today's money. Plus, stealing software hadn't been invented yet, so it was hundreds more to be able to do anything with it.
Of course, computers cost a lot, but you could buy houses for like a nickel.
And cigarettes were cheap and plentiful. Asking somebody not to smoke was imposing on them.
I think most of the kids I grew up with (I'm 47, so definitely Gen X) had a computer in the home, although it was usually a Sinclair Spectrum, a Commodore 64, or a BBC Micro. Although I suppose most of us didn't have one in the house until we were about 14 or 15.
Likewise (39). I think I was 6 or 7 when we got our BBC Micro. We lived in quite an American neighbourhood though, so one of our neighbours owned a Macintosh. And an NES.
I think most of the kids I grew up with (I'm 47, so definitely Gen X) had a computer in the home, although it was usually a Sinclair Spectrum, a Commodore 64, or a BBC Micro. Although I suppose most of us didn't have one in the house until we were about 14 or 15.
Likewise (39). I think I was 6 or 7 when we got our BBC Micro. We lived in quite an American neighbourhood though, so one of our neighbours owned a Macintosh. And an NES.
I'd suggest the unifying technology for the Xers being the national oil company, and for Yers and JIT logistics and the enterprise Windows-Office desktop.
Plus, stealing software hadn't been invented yet
Did you not have Copy II Plus?
Who was going to tell me about it?
Display ads in the back of computer magazines, next to the 400 lines of inscrutable basic code you need to type in to make a simple shooting game that didn't work?
re: 15
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
I remember when my dad brought home a Texas Instruments calculator. He had one early, because he was a Scientist. It was cool.
Inflation calculator tells me that a Spectrum cost around the equivalent of £500 in 2018 money. Which would have been a lot to our family at the time (we were on benefits, as both parents were unemployed), although a LOT less than the equivalent for an Apple, or even a BBC Micro.
I don't know if it's readily available in the US, but there was a fun little dramatisation made a while back of the war between Sinclair and the BBC. Think Halt And Catch Fire, but mostly factual and much more British. And much shorter. Which is tautologous, I know.
19: Spectrum games were dirt cheap, though.
Facebook's recently announced experiment to create corporate rather than government money seems pretty interesting. I still like cash, but that's clearly a disappearing preference.
Physical copies of recordings are another example-- probably the same will happen with books.
Stand to be corrected, but I assume the FB crypto thing is intended to be no more than Visa or SWIFT for Messenger-a channel for payments made in state currencies at either end, whatever the technological implementation.
23. I don't think so. It could shape up that way, but the intention is for businesses to accept payments in libras as well, so that both businesses and individuals will find it convenient to keep a running balance in the currency. As far as I can tell, they're setting up for substantial conflict with rich world banks over whether bank regulations will apply to these accounts. To me, the analogy is with M-Pesa.
Tech Crunch overview: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/18/facebook-libra/
Yes, somewhere between M-Pesa and AliPay/WeChat Pay. With the key difference that it is not in "state currencies" but (assuming they're telling the truth), a basket of currencies. If it's successful, it would in fact supplant state currencies. Which is one reason it's going to get regulated to shit, which Facebook bizarrely don't seem to have anticipated.
They probably hid the feeds of all their friends who are pro-regulation.
Re: the OP, it's my pet peeve again. I continue to think that generations in general are a stupid concept.
Baby Boomers, at least that corresponds to the post-WWII baby boom, a measurable phenomenon with a clear start and end and a clear relation to lots of societal trends. But there's nothing like that for most other generations in pop sociology. Some people say Generation X is a subset of Baby Boomers, some say they overlap, some say they abut, I'm sure someone out there says there's a gap in between them. Same for Gen Y, millennials, and whatever other random labels people make up like in the article in the OP.
I'd agree that the Internet is going to make a generation distinct. But I wouldn't assume without evidence that the Internet generation is going to be distinct from the ubiquitous mobile Internet. (Yeah, probably, but who knows? How big a difference does it really make to have a computer at home with an Internet connection, and a cell phone, but it's not a smartphone?) And the Internet but not ubiquitous mobile Internet generation is going to be small, probably 10 years or less depending on what counts. At this point no one's saying anything meaningful about society or people in it.
Who says Gen X is a subset of Boomers?
29: It feels like there should be a significant difference between "grew up with a computer in the house and could get on the interned when no one else was using it" and "grew up connected to the interned 24/7 unless someone took my phone away".
BTW, how is it that millennial is still being used to denote the Kids These Days? Are there any genuine millennials left who are still kids?
29.2 -- No, I think the folks who mark generations based on shared experience (Strauss, Howe, etc) put the BB gen from 1942-1960 for very specific shared cultural reasons. It's not the demographic post-WWII boom, so much as Elvis, the Beatles, and Kent State. Ending in 1960 instead of 1965 is justified, to the extent that any of this pseudo-science is justified, by shared experiences as well.
Strauss & Howe postulate a 90 year cycle of 4 generations of particular qualities, which can be, and has been, interrupted by particularly traumatic events.
The question, in their framework, would be whether smartphones/internet ubiquity is sufficient to mark the transition from one phase of the 90 year cycle to the next. Their scheme calls for one group to end and another start around 2000, and the same about now. Give or take. In terms of tech, people born after 2000 are certainly sharing an experience of technology that no one before had at comparable stages in life. And we can bet that people born in 2019 and later will have a yet different experience of it; whether this will be a driver more than, say, climate change will be apparent only in retrospect.
Writing in the late 80s, early 90s, S&H identified the birth-control pill as the definitive technology for Gen X -- the unwanted generation. Some Gen X people did end up getting born, of course, and basing all sorts of public policy choices on hating them is going to turn out bad.
The good thing about bullshit pseudo-science is that you can make any facts fit into it.
You can tell millennials are getting old because of all the Sponge Bob-themed hernia trusses at the Walgreens.
31: Simplest explanation is that old people are set in their ways and bad at updating their rhetoric.
I figured the point of "generations" was to capture cohort effects on a wide subset of the population; to a degree, these are real, even if they are usually vastly overstated. The rate of change of technology, as the OP says, does not line up well with cohorts. Clearly this'll be an issue going forward, but it's also an issue going backwards, since rapid technological change is a quite new thing on human scales. It's probably still meaningful to talk about the generation that, say, came up at the beginning of the Thirty Years War.
Halfway through the TC piece:
1. The endpoints are in state currencies. The exchange rate of libra to those currencies is pegged to a basket, but the exchange is libra-[currency].
2. Following from (1), libra is reserve backed, by state paper.
That means there's always 100% of the value of the Libra in circulation, collateralized with real-world assets in the Libra Reserve. It never runs fractional.They might think that's a feature, but for managing a modern economy it's a bug. Fiat currencies are backed by no reserves at all, and thus are able to create at will however much currency the economy needs. Libra in itself cannot create money, cannot act as lender of last resort.
It's probably still meaningful to talk about the generation that, say, came up at the beginning of the Thirty Years War.
Indeed.
Fake International Accounting Trick.
30: In hindsight maybe "subset" is wrong. But the term was coined in this context by an author who wanted "to show society what people born after 1960 think about things", and most people would say Baby Boomers were 1946-1964, so that's overlap. Wikipedia. Wikipedia's page lists other people who say there's overlap.
33: Wouldn't that make Gen X the wanted generation, since we were more optional? Locally, I feel like I'm part of a very small generation since the steel collapse hit when people my age were growing up. So they mostly left the region either with their parents as children or right after finishing school.
a cryptographically authenticated database that acts as a public online ledger designed to handle 1,000 transactions per second. That would be much faster than Bitcoin's 7 transactions per second or Ethereum's 15.Who thinks 1,000 transactions/s is enough to compete with the USD? This doesn't sound any different from standard crypto cuckooland.
basing all sorts of public policy choices on hating them is going to turn out bad.
I suppose that's a slight consolation.
BTW, how is it that millennial is still being used to denote the Kids These Days? Are there any genuine millennials left who are still kids?
XKCD asked the same question today.
40: It's certainly a very messy concept. It's a proxy, but one that can be useful.
I just realized that to the extent vaccination rates are dropping, since the kids mostly measured are young children like kindergarteners, the vast majority of parents of this cohort are probably millennials.
They might think that's a feature, but for managing a modern economy it's a bug.
That pretty much sums up crypto.
About to turn 56-years old and people are still arguing over what generation I belong to. No wonder I'm so damn confused!
33.1 My take has long been that the cut-off for the Boomer/Gen X divide is having a memory of the JFK assassination.
re: 49
I tend to think of it as: could you lead a reasonably comfortable life and an ordinary salary, and retire with enough money to avoid having to eat from trash cans and food banks?
Yes: Boomer
No: X and later.
Finished the piece. As GY says, if it works it's nothing but Alipay/M-pesa, but implemented in the least practical way you could think of.
My brothers and I pooled our saved allowances for so many months to buy a ZX81 (we forced the little brother into it, really). I think it was somewhere around IR£100 and my parents might have bought the cheap tape player that we also needed.
The other technology that was newish when I was a teen was the Walkman and especially the spread of its cheaper imitators.
I almost forgot about the Walkman. Those really were a big change.
If Libra becomes popular and many people carry a large balance of the currency, the reserve will grow huge and earn significant interest.How? Unless libra itself intends becoming a bank, and it seems it doesn't, this implies the reserve is being converted back into state currency and essentially put in a bank. If successful it could be a significant transaction service, but it's every bit as tied into the existing financial system as Mastercard, or cash. I don't think it's significant at all.
By the criteria of 49, I'm Gen X.
By the criteria of 50, I have to wait a while longer to find out.
49 can't be right because it would mean JFK was Gen X.
The full flowering of Personal Computers, the Internet, and Mobile devices define the (three) technological eras for me. They don't really fit into three "popular" generation labels, unless you squint hard, though. "Gen Z" fits the worst, as tech has been faster than human generations can be generated.
As an aside:
Wasn't the "Generation [letter]" thing invented by someone to label each 20-ish year period in US History with a name rather than year numbers? (Odd that five minutes google searching didn't confirm this, which scares me in several ways). Working backwards, "Baby Boomers" are "Generation W" (1945-1965), the "Silent Generation" was "Generation V" (1925-45). The closest thing I could find was Strauss and Howe's idea of 4 generation cycle starting in 1435 (why that?) but they named their generations (in a later book they did a reboot and numbered them with a different starting point) instead of using letters.
||
"It's an incredible resource. It's a beautiful resource. And we do hope there's an opportunity to bring that to market," Shell Australia Chair Zoe Yujnovich said at the conference.|>
If there are substantial reserve deposits, the organization that holds those deposits could then make loans, maybe even loans in libra. That's not in the documents. But if it does take off, whoever holds the deposits will have some power.
What happens now with M-Pesa's float? Is there cross-border transfer of savings now with M-Pesa?
AIUIVaguelyUI m-pesa doesn't have a float because it isn't pretending to be a currency. You put money into your m-pesa account the same way you buy airtime/data for your phone, and essentially send the money to other m-pesa accounts by SMS.
So, if you have a monthly phone plan, you can send as much money as you want for the same price.
Sure, but the people who run the system see that a) every day, there's a net balance of however many million shillings, more than X 100% of days. X/2 into an interest-bearing account is free money for them. Loans in M-Pesa credit at interest would if permitted also be a moneymaker that way. b) If home currency is depreciating predictably and there's a float, or if people stash their depreciating currency in M-Pesa, similar easy money opportunities for the M-Pesa house cashier obtain.
Update: I did some work with the ACS (Census) public use microdata set for 2017, and it seemed to say that the median age of the parent of a child ages 0-10 was 38, a bit older than millennial. That happened to be a California cut of the PUMS, though, so the nationwide distribution could be younger.
62: Yes, and apparently they do. The point is, what you're describing is simply a bank. It isn't a transformative development.
It isn't. But, as they say, that's where the money is.
49 -- Yeah, it's part of a suite of things. Moon landing, Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Kent State.
57 -- When I was first paying attention, they weren't going back to 1435 for Anglo-America. At the same time, though, iirc they were quoting ancient Greeks etc on the existence of the 90 year cycle. But it's never perfectly arithmetic, because you have triggering events (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) missing generations (the Civil War cycle has 3 instead of 4), and, obviously, something like WWII is a completely different kind of shared experience looked back at from 1965 US or from 1965 Germany.
Astrologers would say there's an 84 year cycle for societies (Uranus) and a 29.5 year cycle for individuals (Saturn).
If you have a cycle on Uranus, you can get those shorts with the padding.
For a sense of reality, perunsourced article M-Pesa handled 1.5bn transaction in Kenya in 2016. I make that 2,480 transactions/second.
66.1: I do remember the Moon landing I don't remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, but the story goes that as a young toddler I would dance to Beatles songs. I have a degree from Kent State University.
64. If you can make the loans in your own currency, then I think it is something new. Probably not from the perspective of a large central bank, but for say Argentina (where there was a wave of bitcoin buying by prdinary people because of currency devaluation fears) possibly.
I think they really are planning on using a blockchain for this, shared among a consortium of companies that each run a validation node. What that means is that every company in the consortium will have a complete record of everybody's transactions. Because why just hand over your private financial information to Facebook when you could also hand it to Uber and MasterCard and Lyft and eBay and Spotify and Vodaphone and "Ribbit Capital," whatever the hell that is?
36.4 to 70.
Further, if the libra is leading to a major outflow from the local currency, the service can simply be blocked, and will be, just like all the other FB services are.
I expect in fact could be blocked far more easily than transactions in regular foreign currencies.
66,69: The moon landings were real, but everyone knows that the Beatles and Ed Sullivan were faked.
Are you focusing on the rate as a source of weakness? I think that's a mistake. Rapid turnaround is necessary for large transactions between agents that don't trust each other. If it takes a while for beer money to my buddy to clear, no problem. Also, transactions between accounts help on a common platform (like fb's ) can be authenticated much faster, with reconciliation of the intra-broker transactions with the full public ledger registering more slowly.
The public ledger and language for transactions are to entice other entities to develop software to pull in their clients' money, ideally without introducing scams. A wallet controlled by a few big companies with hundreds of millions of clients each could still be transformative for places like Argentina and also much faster than the odd federated thing described.
Nationwide dataset: 36 is the median age of parents with children
Rg.
Nationwide dataset: 36 is the median age of parents with children <= 10. Parents aged 15-36 make up 50.09% of all such parents - so that is a bare, bare majority millennial or younger, taking 1981 as the cusp-birth-year.
If it takes a while for beer money to my buddy to clear, no problem.
If I want a beer now then we got a problem.
70.1: It's only new to the extent the bank can create more of its currency*. Which, as described by TC, libra can't do at all. If the bank can't create currency, effectively it's just doing business in a foreign currency. AFAIK that's actually nothing new at all in many developing countries, certainly not in Argentina.
*Actually also not new at all, see US 19C history, Chinese IIRC Ming history, Japanese imperial 20C history.
In theory, our existing banking system could finally decide to move forward with adopting a half-decent real-time payment system and blow this thing out of the water. Not holding my breath on that, though.
why just hand over your private financial information
Merchant fees for credit cards are at least 2%, so an immediate motivation is for a discount. Then, like grocery discounts for identifiable rather than anonymous customers, there's the prospect of separate discounting.
73. Most governments are less effective than China's . Argentina's government tried to ban Bitcoin buying at the time.
This initiative might fail, either because of regulation or because it turns out to be unpopular. But I do not understand claiming today that it's obviously not worth watching.
It can't be overemphasized, the functional equivalent of this already exists in multiple countries, ranging from Afghanistan to China. The world has not moved.
Sometimes, it is the size of the lever, I guess.
It's not the length of the lever, it's the firmness of the fulcrum.
I think you'd have to have been born later than 1963 to not remember the moon landing. OTOH you'd have to have been born later than 1958 not to remember the first Kennedy assassination. I don't think they were quasi-simultaneous to a young child, and a young child would remember them to some extent because they were epochal and everybody was talking about them.
The moon landing and the 1968 assassinations, maybe.
It's about participating in a shared experience, and the lines are necessarily blurry. Born in late 1958, I knew of President Kennedy's death nearly at the time, but didn't actually participate in the as-it-unfolds revelation of it. Moon landing I didn't just watch, but felt part of a community watching: a different quality of experience for the average 10 year old than the average 6 year old.
I feel pretty close, culturally, to my older colleagues -- from high school til I was 30, I was the youngest in most crowds I was in (including work categories), and have always identified with pre-1960 folks and not post. Then, when I was 30, I went to law school with a bunch of people born after 1960 -- some even after 1964 -- and ended up throwing my lot (for comment 50 purposes) with the Despised Ones.* I find myself empathetic but not converted.
* AHMHB the running joke of graduating HS in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s, then graduating college in the worst recession since the 1930s, then finishing law school in the midst of a downturn, then getting elected partner in the midst of a downturn, then starting self-employment in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s. Each of these things was worse for Xers . . .
How soon we forget! The major high tech innovation of the 1980's was cable television. It had existed in rural areas earleir, but only as a way to bring the networks to places with spotty reception. The TV with more than 10 or so channels, 4 channels in smaller markets) started around 1980. CNN, MTV, and ESPN all began in 1979-81. HBO was a little bit earlier but it had almost no market until 1980.
You Gen X'ers have no idea how much it changed our relationship to television, to news, and to entertainment generally. Before 1980, children's cartoons were available only on Saturday mornings. Younger elementary school kids didn't watch much TV on school nights because there was nothing of interest. Shift workers never saw first-run sitcoms. The small number of choices meant that everyone saw the same shows.
If the President wanted to talk to the American people, he was on every single channel.
When Clarence Thomas complained about a high tech lynching in 1990, the high tech was cable television, particularly CNN and a few competitors. A few yers earlier, Walter Cronkite and his owners, and their counterparts at exactly two other networks, would have decided the story was too yucky to broadcast, and it would have been unknown outside of readers of the Washington Post and New York Times (all of whom lived in those two metro areas).
The VCR also came into being in the mid-1980's, another life changer, more for the ability to rent movies than for home recording.
90.2: I can remember all that. Cable didn't come to my town until I was about twelve. I can still remember one guy making fun of a friend who lived outside of town, where there was no cable, by asking "What was on UHF last night?"
90: Yeah, that's all correct. Not in my darkest fantasies did it ever occur to me that the proliferation of great sources of information would lead to an objectively stupider citizenry. CNN in 1985 was better than CBS in 1975. The New York Times and Washington Post were great institutions -- but to understand the world, I have better stuff at my fingertips today.
And yet, here we are.
I suppose we treat marginalized folks in a somewhat less awful fashion. That's a pretty big deal. But back when CNN was a semi-serious news organization, would Americans have really insisted on baking the planet? Jimmy Carter put fucking solar panels on the White House roof in 1979!
57 and 90 make me think your interpretation of holding up the middle and index finger could sort you into generations- victory in WWII, peace in the 60s, the V miniseries in the 80s, V for vendetta in the 00s. Or fuck off if you're from a commonwealth nation.
My parents refused to get cable. They said we were too remote but I suspect they were lying. But over the air we got channels 2 4 5 7 9 11 13 and 21. Now apparently OTA channels even have subchannels, there's a 2.1 2.2 2.3 and 2.4.
And channel 3 was what you used to receive your video game console signal.
I feel so wonderfully old in all this -- not chronologically, although I'm 64 -- but with reference to television. I was one of the earliest people I know on the internet (email with bang paths in 1986; the 120th person to sign up for home internet access in the entire UK back when there was only one provider) but television never really intruded on my life. Because we grew up in Yugoslavia I never saw it at all* until I was eight or nine. I don't think we had colour TV until I was about fifteen or sixteen; in Sweden in my twenties there were two channels and no commercials. I can't remember if we even had a set in most of our flats.
I really believe one result was that I was capable of deeper and more concentrated thought for a long time than I would otherwise have been. Getting your picture of the world through what is essentially a giant mall has huge disadvantages.
It does mean, though, that I spend a lot of time enraged by advertisements - simply by their existence: how dare these strangers lie to me?
* can't quite be true: my grandparents had a set in their kitchen which lived in a wooden cabinet, with doors, which were mostly shut. All I can remember is how grainy the picture was and how much the screen bulged. It never carried any verisimilitude at all. God knows how old it was, but it may have been bought for the coronation (1953).
AS for generations, I think that very few are real and all are probably class bound as well. The WW2 generation in Britain is one obvious exception: rationing, bombing, men away at war, all gave a coherent shared experience of suffering and responses to it which can't properly be compared to "we saw the same music videos".
76.1: The whole supposed point of blockchain is a single unified ledger. If FB or Visa record a million trans/s and the unified ledger 1000/s the various ledgers would reconcile.
And the main projected use case isn't person-person it's person to business. Many businesses know their customers well enough to tolerate delay, many don't. I'd hazard the latter includes the majority of all transactions, especially by value.
You Gen X'ers have no idea how much it changed our relationship to television, to news, and to entertainment generally. Before 1980, children's cartoons were available only on Saturday mornings. Younger elementary school kids didn't watch much TV on school nights because there was nothing of interest. Shift workers never saw first-run sitcoms. The small number of choices meant that everyone saw the same shows.
Do you mean young Gen X'ers? Because I'm an early Gen X'er and this all tracks with my experience.
90 is interesting. I'm almost 40 and my family never had cable. I watched MTV at a friend's house, but rarely anytime besides Saturday night (so, mostly Headbanger's Ball). My dad ran a video store in the mid-80s, though, so that was indeed a huge part of my life, albeit a carefully curated selection of kids' videos (the Swedish Pippi Longstocking, Watership Down, the old sad Little Mermaid, plenty of 60s and 70s Disney). I honestly can't imagine a version of my childhood with cable TV; it's as weird as pasting in the dotcom-era web. Would it have been like the anomalous year in kindergarten when I spent the afternoons at an in-home daycare staring at Nickelodeon for hours? I'm not sure that would have been good. That stuff was terrible.
Both my daughter and my nephew have tight screen time limits that result less from ideology than from the way video-watching seems to drive them insane with obsessive desire. Nephew's little sister has pretty much zero interest in video and will always choose a live human over a recorded one. I assume at some point it will all regress to the mean?
76.1: The whole supposed point of blockchain is a single unified ledger. If FB or Visa record a million trans/s and the unified ledger 1000/s the various ledgers would reconcile.
Presumably they could/would have to implement something like Lightning to handle that, but personally I think if it takes off they'll just drop the DLT tech entirely.
DLT tech is the new ATM machine, apparently.
AIUIVaguelyUI m-pesa doesn't have a float because it isn't pretending to be a currency. You put money into your m-pesa account the same way you buy airtime/data for your phone, and essentially send the money to other m-pesa accounts by SMS.
That is the float. Though it seems in this case it doesn't benefit M-Pesa's owners.
M-PESA wallets are denominated in e-float backed
100% by liquid deposits held by Safaricom in fully
regulated commercial banks - initially only the
Commercial Bank of Africa (CBA), and now also
Standard Chartered Bank (SCB). The interest from
these balances accrues to a charitable foundation,
and is not distributed to either Safaricom or M-PESA
customers.
In Facebook's case, the node operators share in the interest proceeds from the float, so it could become a very substantial source of revenue. Generally money transmitters don't have huge floats, but partly because of the way Libra is supposed to operate (ie you have to actively transfer into fiat and pay fees to do so, or use it within network), and partly because it also plans to be a payment processor, I imagine it will run much larger floats than other money transmitters. Alipay's parent runs the world's largest money market fund using the Alipay float. That's probably more what we're talking about, if this is successful (and if they don't stick to bank accounts as they legally have to as a money transmitter).
If you had cable TV before adulthood but owned a house before you ever heard of avacado toast, you're Gen X.
There was cable TV in the town I grew up in as early as I can remember, but I didn't grow up in town, I grew up 6 miles from town. We got our TV from an antenna until I was 16. Three channels: NBC, CBS, PBS. When I was around 16 we got a satellite dish.
Atossa would watch TV all day if we let her. We have a house rule of a maximum of on hour on weekdays and two hours on weekends, just enforced by parents keeping track of things. Worse, until recently almost all her TV was Amazon, Netflix, and PBS Kids, which might rot the brain like all TV does but at least it's curated. She's recently started asking for shows on YouTube, which is scary.
Some of that regulation GY was talking about.
Also, this from Mark Carney just dropped in my inbox:
The Bank of England approaches Libra with an open mind but not an open door. Unlike social media for which standards and regulations are being debated well after it has been adopted by billions of users, the terms of engagement for innovations such as Libra must be adopted in advance of any launch.
Libra, if it achieves its ambitions, would be systemically important. As such it would have to meet the highest standards of prudential regulation and consumer protection. It must address issues ranging from anti-money laundering to data protection to operational resilience. Libra must also be a pro-competitive, open platform that new users can join on equal terms. In addition, authorities will need to consider carefully the implications of Libra for monetary and financial stability. Our citizens deserve no less.
107, 108. Points well taken; Most places also have strict regulations for taxis and hotels, but Uber and Airbnb. As for banking regulations, the ease of creating a holding company with secret beneficial owners make a mockery of this. I don't foresee what's going to happen with libra either, and of course the banks will encourage their regulators to kill it.
But the outcome of that conflict doesn't seem clear to me at this point. Maybe there's a clear argument for how regulators will succeed in stopping it, but saying that there are rules in place and that the regulators will try to apply them isn't dispositive to me.
109: Also point taken. Counterpoints:
Uber and Airbnb compete with taxi associations and hotels, and tangle with municipal regulators, one city at a time. Libra aims apparently to compete with banks, and tangle with national treasuries and central banks, and to do so in all the world's richest countries, pretty much all at once. The scale of conflict and regulation is of a wholly different order.
Enforcing income taxes on billionaires with offshore shell companies is indeed difficult. But libra isn't intended for wealth management, it's intended for day to day transactions; requiring FB and all the other operators of the system to levy taxes on transactions wouldn't be difficult at all, especially considering all the relevant documentation is by design already digitized and tied to individuals.
Multinational enforcement mechanisms are also very powerful: the US secondary sanctions system is at this moment choking the life out of Iran and Huawei, one a nation state,* the other backed with the full weight of the PRC.
*For a sense of scale: FB turnover is ~$50bn; Iranian GDP ~$430bn.
To be clear, I'm not saying that regulators will "succeed in stopping it", or even that they will try to stop, at least in some countries. I'm saying that Facebook's apparent belief that it (OK, the Foundation) can operate Libra without meaningful regulation is profoundly, and bizarrely, mistaken. Uber and AirBnB, yes, but the point is Uber and AirBnB are increasingly regulated like any other taxi/hotel company. Payment processing is a highly lucrative business, and the basket-of-currencies thing could have some appeal in places with volatile currencies (though that's also where it's most likely to face the stiffest regulatory opposition). There's no reason they couldn't build a viable platform if they build a sufficiently compelling ecosystem. It just won't look much like the one they've described.
Magic Circle law firm on the regulatory and political issues that will be encountered by Libra.
There's also a piece in the FT today pointing out that Libra will be creating potential capital gains liability for its users with every transaction. It's not really a new thing, as the same is true of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, at least in the UK. But it does rather point to the difficulties it faces unless it can persuade governments to change their regulations. They clearly intend to, but it seems extraordinarily hubristic even by Facebook standards to think that regulation will become more accommodating of something that undermines national currencies rather than less.
You want deep fakes of every Democratic candidate eating a live kitten or do you want to play ball?
I would totes vote for a kittenophage.
You'll need a whole litter or some Democrats are gonna go hungry.
117: It doesn't matter how many kittens you supply -- everyone but me is going to leave hungry! ROAR!
I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this article in Slate.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/06/doctor-plotkas-mouthwatchers-toothbrush-review-html.html
Today's Matt Levine column, about RobinHood's abortive checking and savings account, and the relationship between tech startups and financial regulation seems pertinent.
