I didn't find this refutation especially convincing, and the way it is presented makes it seem ideologically motivated.
The underlying argument in that article is that the people around Calment would have known that Yvonne is not Jeanne, and therefore they would have been caught.
An alternative explanation is that the people around Calment knew nothing of her claiming to be Jeanne at all until much later on in her life. By which time the only people who knew about the fraudulent claim would be either very old themselves, or sympathetic to the situation an old and dear friend or family member has found themselves in.
The only way to know for sure would be DNA testing.
> An alternative explanation is that the people around Calment knew nothing of her claiming to be Jeanne at all until much later on in her life. By which time the only people who knew about the fraudulent claim would be either very old themselves, or sympathetic to the situation an old and dear friend or family member has found themselves in.
This doesn't make sense - there is witness testimony and other records attesting that Yvonne, the daughter, died. Her husband sought leave from the military to be by her side.
If it was fraud, it was likely mail fraud, at least at first. That is to say, the people closest around her would not necessarily have known that she was claiming to be Jeanne - the family only had to have a death certificate issued in Yvonne's name, everything else could have continued as normal. And when she did finally have to publicly assume Jeanne's identity enough time had passed that few people would remember her mother.
But still, there is proof that people in that time believed that Yvonne had been sick, and died. Would they have buried Jeanne under her daughter's name and no one noticed?
Yeah, if you move fictional dollars in the form of USDT to USDC then you are just shifting the imaginary amount around, it doesn't change the fact $61B is rendered worthless.
And that’s actually been happening. For week’s usdc’s biggest trading pair has been usdt. So some people are dumping usdt on usdc holders at 1:1 ratios.
Why anyone holding usdc would exchange one for a usdt at par is a question I don’t have an answer to, but it’s happening en masse.
I don't think there really are any (or many) reserves. I think they just printed a bunch of tokens, used the tokens to buy BTC and to inflate the value of the crypto they hold in Bitfinex (Bitfinex and Tether are approximately the same company). If they throw in the towel they lose their ability to influence the crypto market which is where their actual gains come from.
That seems most likely. They thought that it doesn't matter if they back these tethers with BTC because BTC is a better investment than the UDS anyways. Once they went down that path they had no way of getting out other than printing more tether to prop up BTC when BTC dropped.
Any rational person can see that Tether poses an existential risk to the crypto economy - but the market is highly irrational. There was an interview with tether's CTO and GC the other day that was an absolute car crash[0] and should be sounding deafening warning bells for anyone invested in crypto, but instead we see the BTC price shoot up by 15% in the days since it aired. It is utter madness.
In the ending days of Mt Gox's meltdown, prices went up up up for quite a few digital assets, until they didn't.
Basically the shady exchanges are insolvent and they stop cashing out real money, so peoples' only chance to cash out is to buy crypto and transfer it out, driving up crypto pricing on the insolvent exchanges, that greedy people try to arbitrage.
BTC shot up (by about 250%) the last time Tether was nearly shut down as well, as the NY AG was investigating them from Apr - Jun 2019.
It makes sense when you consider that the population holding cryptocurrencies generally considers the USD worthless (you see that in some of the other posts here). USD are not an option. If Tether goes under, the next most stable reserve currency of the crypto economy is Bitcoin, so money flies out of Tether and into Bitcoin, pumping the price up.
According to this article [1], about 70% of the current buy pressure on BTC comes from USDT. If tether value collapses, that tether won't be able to afford any BTC, so it won't matter where it flies to. And 70% of the buy pressure on BTC will disappear.
it is because binance got transferred a whole bunch of tether and also created a whole bunch of its own stablecoin right before that huge spike last night.
>it is because binance got transferred a whole bunch of tether and also created a whole bunch of its own stablecoin right before that huge spike last night.
What you are describing is just people moving money to an exchange and buying with leverage, not fraud. Price moves up when large buyers step in with FOMO.
That seems extremely unlikely, there's only so many hours in the day and while I'm sure that he has a keen eye on what's going on the odds of him being personally involved in the actual engineering are close to zero. If he's spending time doing that it'd actually be a huge failure on his part, there are more important things for him to spend his time on.
I lightly disagree, maybe he doesn't do the calculations or write the tests, but he's almost certainly grilling people all the way down to ensure alignment on engineering. His passion being engineering, he's probably not asking 'program management 101' questions, but doing a smell-test on your technical work and your competence level just as a fellow-level senior engineer would.
A while back I saw an interview with a NASA engineer they loaned to SpaceX for six months. He described a meeting in which two engineering proposals were being debated, and at the end Musk said "ok we'll do it this way" and that was the end of it. The guy was kinda blown away, and said at NASA they'd have had a dozen more meetings first.
Given that SpaceX lives or dies by how well their rockets work, I don't think there's really anything more important for Musk to be doing.
He's one of the richest people in the world, with a massive interest in space & rockets, and owns the most exciting piece of space technology being built today. Where else would you spend your time in this situation?
I would probably spend my time focussed on growing and sustaining my companies and hiring very skilled people to do that engineering work for me, I'd be very interested in the engineering work, but I wouldn't be doing that work myself. Similarly I don't expect Mark Zuckerberg writes much code at facebook these days, there's just too much other stuff to do
If you're goal is literally just a successful company, then sure that makes sense.
But if you actually have a passion for what you do (and I'm not arguing that Zuckerberg doesn't have a passion for spying on people), and the company is already a huge success, why wouldn't you spend your time doing something that you think is really really cool and hire very skilled people to do the other stuff?
If your goal is to get rich and play golf and relax, that is one thing. The fact that Elon is one of the wealthiest people in the world and also as passionate as someone working in their garage seems kind of like a crazy situation.
I wonder if there is similar historical precedence in terms of an ultra wealthy person being interested and involved like he is.
For Elon Musk, Jim Keller or even Steve Jobs, their value isn't in manually doing the CAD / VHDL / Code, rather, it is being the Eye of Mordor on the critical path and understanding the solution top to bottom. No excuses, only problem solving.
I feel the key insight behind both SpaceX and Tesla is that both the napkin engineering from first principle and then having the force of will to personally see it through /are/ the most important thing. Both qualify as engineering.
Happy to have my fairy tale hero's journey view of success corrected.
Anyone inclined to argue against this could maybe sink 1,000 hours into Factorio. The game is simple enough to require 1-person-engineer, but complex enough that the player must both solve low-level problems AND be The Eye of Mordor. If you don’t relentlessly pursue both, you get stuck in the tarpit and progress stalls.
This is true. The average person on the subway or in a restaurant has no real malice or ill intent toward their fellow traveler/patron, whereas the average salesperson or business associate on the job is actively looking to hoodwink you.
This is genuinely unsettling. I wonder if this will need to be extinguished by using explosives, as the scale of the fire looks certain to overwhelm the capacity of the pumps on those ships.
hardly anyone cares, hardly anyone is going to choose your product over a competitor's because yours has dark mode. For most companies this stuff is a distraction from the real work that matters. See also: achieving 100% lighthouse score
I personally use darkmode when I can. I for one appreciate the sites and applications that put it in. However, I am not going to pester anyone to put it in.
I can see why many would not bother. It means keeping at least 2 sets of colors going. Try putting green text on a grey background for example and you are going to have a bad time. It means making a lot of choices you already made and feel you are not going to get much out of it. I have seen many applications botch it. Thinking all you have to do is toggle the background to something dark and call it a day. It means probably means a redo of all of your art assets, and at a minimum what font colors you are using and making everything respect it.
The underlying argument in that article is that the people around Calment would have known that Yvonne is not Jeanne, and therefore they would have been caught.
An alternative explanation is that the people around Calment knew nothing of her claiming to be Jeanne at all until much later on in her life. By which time the only people who knew about the fraudulent claim would be either very old themselves, or sympathetic to the situation an old and dear friend or family member has found themselves in.
The only way to know for sure would be DNA testing.