I'm sorry, but if the ledger wallet was actually compromised it would be an extremely sophisticated zero day hack that the hackers would not compromise being exposed over a few hundred thousand.
The fact he saved a screenshot on his iPhone of either passphrase, which is number one do not, shows he wasn't being careful and likely made other mistakes that could have been exploited.
I do feel for your nephew, but it's almost certainly user error and not related to the ledger wallet at all.
I think more importantly, the government realized how badly Facebook could hurt their influence in the Asia Pacific region. Without Australian news on Facebook, people in nearby developing countries would be getting their international news from from other countries (china).
Do the people in nearby developing countries speak English? Or Chinese?
Which countries are we talking about?
It seems far more likely to me that people in nearby developing countries will get their international news from locals who follow international news for professional reasons, which would be impacted not at all by whether Australian news links can be shown on Facebook.
>Do the people in nearby developing countries speak English?
In most pacific island, yes. In places like East Timor English it's not uncommon at all, news is also often shared via relatives who live abroad. Do you really think china doesn't have multiple news outlets written in English to promote their power abroad, just look at the South China morning Post.
>It seems far more likely to me that people in nearby developing countries will get their international news from locals who follow international news for professional reason
I'm confused why you would think that? A lot of these countries have specific phone plans which exclude Facebook data and they like a large amount of people get their news on social media.
>> It seems far more likely to me that people in nearby developing countries will get their international news from locals who follow international news for professional reasons
> I'm confused why you would think that?
Simple; it's true everywhere. Most people do not care about international news; they do not ever seek it out.
Maybe you feel that way because you live in a country with significant independent media and don’t need to rely on international news outlets reporting on news that directly effects you.
I find it odd the only accusation they list against Whatsapp is it was sending metadata, then list a group of alternatives who largely use the same metadata.
I understand the hate for Facebook and why people are obviously skeptical. But is there something more I'm missing here around what whatsapp/facebook are accused of? It seems like it was just timestamps and public profile information.
I guess it stems from a time when all you really had to work with was physical evidence and the only records being what officers had written down. So it really wouldn't have worked any other way. A suspect is always going to say whatever makes them seem innocent. "I wasn't holding that knife when you arrested me" would be impossible to disprove if the suspect was wearing gloves at the time or forensic evidence wasn't yet available. So in some ways the officers word had to hold more weight.
It seems like the only solution is for every single interaction to be digitally recorded.
Why does comic-con pay famous actors to appear? I assume because it attracts the type of audience they see as their customers.
Hedge fund billionaires, bankers and policy makers on the other hand aren't going to show up to listen to what johnny depp has to say. So you have to pay for someone who will be draw for them. The higher the status of the customers you want, the more you'll find yourself paying.
In the case of Comic-Con, they do that because their audience who pay for their tickets are more likely to pay if the actors they like are part of the experience.
In this case, we are talking about companies paying people exorbitant sums for no other reason that at some point the speaker may be in a position to affect the flow of government largess.
Even "networking" in this context is geared towards signaling to friend & foe that you now have inside reach to people whose actions or even mere words can move mountains of money in one direction or another.
Totally different.
By the way, this is standard textbook economic analysis and it would not be different if the names and political parties were switched.
I have a hard time reconciling the fact you claim to be making a dispassionate analysis, and yet cannot find a single accomplishment of Janet Yellen that would merit her being an in-demand speaker, except her ability to ‘direct government largesse’. If you were trying to make a sincere argument, I suspect you’d find a few reasons people would value her ideas.
> being an in-demand speaker, except her ability to ‘direct government largesse’
She was a decent economist. Her work not associated with politics ended as the 20th century was in the rearview mirror. Take a look at her bibliography[1]. The interesting non-proceedings/non-Fed papers end in the 90s.
There are many other economists who are just as good (i.e. capable of talking at length in sleep inducing tone without providing any deep insight but making general statements about topics that sound like they should be interesting). No one pays them a bazigillion bucks to read their policy papers out loud.
What evidence do you have that she gets paid the bucks due to her attributes as a speaker?
That’s not the only reason to hear her opinions, but among the group that can afford to pay those fees, her ability to direct largess is their most important reason.
As someone interested in economics, I would like to hear a speech by Janet Yellen. She is intelligent and interesting and even has a unique voice along with her Brooklyn accent that makes her even more interesting.
I have organized business events and while I haven't ever been involved with hiring someone as high profile as Yellen, I can certainly understand why she could command an $800k speaking fee. I have seen speakers with much less cachet (very little chance you have ever heard of them) draw $50k speaking fees.
Also, this wasn't one speaking fee for Yellen, it was multiple multi-day events over s period of time.
People are paying $250k for a single speech from Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Godin and they are presumably not getting any political benefits for hiring them. So I see nothing odd about Janet Yellen getting $800k total for several speeches.
I don't see how they are different at all. The talker is used to bring in a certain type of person they're looking for. How they convert that persons attendance in to a return for their business is irrelevant. Comic-on doesn't just make money on tickets, bringing those customers in also leads to them making more transactions inside
> In this case, we are talking about companies paying people exorbitant sums for no other reason that at some point the speaker may be in a position to affect the flow of government largess.
That's conjecture and no we aren't. We were specifically discussing “wall street speaking fees” and why they demand such a high rate. Which there are clearly other valid business incentives other than the one you've landed on.
As to whether this specific case had nefarious motives. I don't know enough to have a strong opinion either way.
I assume it's organized to attract and bring it wealthy individuals, who I suspect are not the easiest to get time with. When you think about it, it's a small price to pay to get a large group of billionaires in the same room and what their prospective business/donations could be worth depending on what you're selling/promoting.
Just think the type of people you get in to the same room who normally wouldn't give you the time of day if you had obama agree to give a private talk.
Credit worthiness should be because of an individuals past actions and not some attribute they may have been born with. Why should a tall individual who's never missed a payment have some invisible penalization applied because some other tall people are worse at re-paying loans.
Don't you see the issue here? You're penalizing individuals not based on their own measurable behavioral signals, but simply due to some physical trait they share with others. Not to mention, we wouldn't even understand why there's a correlation in the first place. Maybe tall people are 30% likely to have some unknown gene, why should the other 70% of tall people who don't have the gene be treated the same?
We must disambiguate between political objectives and the practice of credit risk modelling.
Credit risk, f(X), is an unknown population function that needs to be estimated using observed data X.
If including tallness into X improves our estimate of f(X), then we've gotten a better model.
You've asserted that X should only contain an individual's past actions instead of their inherent traits such as tallness. This may satisfy certain political objectives, and that's fine if we're being upfront about the underlying motivation, but from an ML perspective your prescription doesn't make much sense unless you have some prior knowledge about the function f(X) that tells you that tallness both isn't relevant and isn't acting as an instrumental variable for some other missing feature.
Unless you have such domain knowledge, you've little business asserting what are appropriate features to use in order to improve model quality.
Credit risk modelling is a Political Objective. They can't be separated. The only place they are separated is in the figment of someones imagination. The use and investigation of these models does not happen in a vacuum. The real question is, does better modeling help society? And that is through and through a political question.
I don't agree that this has anything to do with political objectives. It's a question of ethics. My domain knowledge is irrelevant, the ML Modelling aspect is irrelevant. The discussion was specifically around whether it's ok to include inherent traits when determining the credit worthiness of an individual.
If you think it is, that's fine. We might as well just taking the same approach to crime, and start locking individuals up or not extending job offers, NOT because they've done a single thing wrong, but simply because they're statistically more likely to.
> We might as well just taking the same approach to crime, and start locking individuals up or not extending job offers,
The main difference is that people have right to trial and to be considered innocent until proven guilty. But there is no 'right to credit'. Credit is fundamentally two-party contract.
Also there is shared limit to risk, forcing creditors to take more risk with some people means they may not take that risk in other cases (not giving credit to someone who would be marked lower risk with more informed decision) or forcing them to raise credit cost to everybody.
Making the statistical model for E(claims) worse on purpose by excluding relevant features (e.g. inherent traits) is political. The insurers have no choice since the ethical views of the majority are hoisted upon them through politics. The causal path has its roots in an ethical conversation that has played out in public, but this has mediated itself through politics/legislation.
The crime analogy is inappropriate. Insurance is a private voluntary arrangement between two consenting entities. Convictions on the other hand are an involuntary imposition on an unwilling party.
One could make the argument that allowing inherent traits in the pricing of insurance is the less authoritarian and more utilitarian option, since it is less forceful state interference in private business and leads to more accurate claims pricing and less subsidisation of insurance for person A by person B. Your prison sentencing analogy on the other hand implies more force, which is why I don't view it as a valid analogy.
The ethical argument can go either way depending on the axioms we pick a priori. If we pick Libertarian deontological axioms, then the ethical choice is to allow inherent traits into the model. If we pick racial equity deontological axioms, then we get another conclusion.
I also think that it is possible that the model learned that information from too small of a data sample. What is a good data sample for every such feature in a relatively balanced manner is really difficult to build a dataset from.
Consider a sample size of 10/1million with height value of 7m. And somehow 7/10 had poor ability to repay loans. With such a small sample size of this relevant factor be a good thing to rely on?
The point is that these algorythms do study your behaviour and correlate it with the behaviour of others. These predictions don't have to be 100% accurate to be useful. What's wrong with 70% of tall people benefiting from being associated with the other 30%? This only lasts until someone figures out how they are different and breaks the association right?
> This only lasts until someone figures out how they are different and breaks the association right?
Would you be OK if banks started charging you 4% more interest because say you have irish heritage? Your behaviour hasn't changed and nobody can explain why it matters that your father was irish, but the models determined it's statistically significant,
What if at some point 30 years down the line it's determined it wasn't even related to irish heritage. There was just coincidentally long running extreme predatory lending by banks in cities with large irish populations.
Would you still feel there's nothing wrong with it?
But you're only looking at this from a single perspective, where every single bank starts charging the same 4% simply because of irish heritage.
What if, one bank started doing it because they used this model. But another bank doesn't, because they don't believe this model?
If you were an irish person, you would just move banks. And if it turns out, indeed, that the first bank was over-charging the 4% (ie., no irish person defaults due to their being irish), then they've lost business for no reason, and the 2nd bank got more business.
However, if it turns out that being irish _does_ indeed cause you to default more, then the bank charging an extra 4% was correct. The 2nd bank, upon finding proof of this, would also start charging an extra 4% (otherwise, they'd be losing out money to the first bank).
So in the end, a bank can only charge the most appropriate interest rate for the market to bear.
The number of loans a bank gives out to such a specific factor might be low enough that it would take 30 years for a bank to have an actual study. That's 1-2 generations of abuse.
What I don't understand, is why the government is trying to push through a law and seem ok with a result of the complete removal of access to news from peoples two largest sources. During a pandemic, with continually occurring lockdowns.
The average salary in Australia is $55k, the average in the Philippines is $3.9k. Not taking in to account disposable income that's about a factor of 15. The entire philippines only has 4 times the population of Australia. The 2 markets aren't even comparable.
User value to companies that serve advertising is based on what companies are willing to pay to serve ads to them. Which is directly tied to the monetary value of that users business to the company buying the advertisement.
They love to defer to their free market ideology roots, no matter how far diverged their words and actions become.
The last decade they've been picking winners like nobody's business and yet the opposition party is, for reasons that I can't determine, impotent in pointing this out for political advantage.
The current Australian Government will do whatever it takes to secure competitive advantage for it's donors.
The endless funding to the car industry trying to prevent the inevitable was a classic example. It didn't alter things one bit.
The Greens are the closest thing to an effective opposition. Both the main parties have effectively the same policies, the same supporters (now the unions are rooted) and the same voter base.
The fact he saved a screenshot on his iPhone of either passphrase, which is number one do not, shows he wasn't being careful and likely made other mistakes that could have been exploited.
I do feel for your nephew, but it's almost certainly user error and not related to the ledger wallet at all.