"Russia has since then paid off the debt with the petrodollars. The US, as an oil importer, of course, is on the other end. But don't envy the petrostates -- none of them are in a particularly good shape even today with very high oil prices.
US sovereign default would only be possible through a combination of congressional and executive hiccup (because the Fed is "independent", both branches would need to forget the bill). The treasurys are denominated in US currency -- a situation unique for sovereign debt. The US can so far simply print more dollars and inflate its way out of debt." - Stanislav Shalunov
"[700B is] not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number." - Stanislav Shalunov
The UK government wants to have it so that users get their net connection cut when a "right holder" tells the ISP they're using P2P. No courts required. No appeal. No notification or warning mentioned. Tell mike.klym@berr.gsi.gov.uk and adrian.brazier@berr.gsi.gov.uk what you think before end of October. - Stanislav Shalunov
"Success in escaping was [...] also influenced by the educational level of the parents, a higher rate of success being associated with fewer years of education" - Stanislav Shalunov
"The users will probably first hate it, complain about it, and then get used to it. The way I saw a user describe her new profile: "Why can't I add [app X] to my profile? It was there before."" - Stanislav Shalunov
That's good advice, but dismally low CTR across the board. The conclusion should have been that none of the titles worked. Because the article is useful, this is most likely due to bidding on insufficiently relevant keywords. - Stanislav Shalunov
"Check ages outside of the US -- say, UK or Canada. Much closer to general demographics.
Keywords that users are supposed to enter into their interests are garbage, which is why there is no premium in targeting for particular ones. If you have an investing app, fetch interests of its users and look at fraction who have entered "investing". Other than you, anyone?
There's clearly carrying capacity for serious apps. Different estimates range from pessimistic 5% of users ("just" a few million) to 30%. Giggly apps are more viral, but if they competed in separate categories, this would not matter." - Stanislav Shalunov
"Yes, the giggly and serious parts of Facebook indeed resemble MySpace and LinkedIn. But look closer: serious Facebook >? LinkedIn Most people basically only use LinkedIn when looking for a job. Serious Facebook offers much more and gives you a reason to visit often. Currently, however, because of the giggly noise, serious Facebook does not live up to its promise of facilitating day-to-day networking and keeping in touch with people instead of job-hunting. (Yes, LinkedIn cloned a bunch of Facebook features and this made LinkedIn more useful. My point exactly.) giggly Facebook > MySpace Giggly apps make Facebook fun. Infinite supply of quizzes, fun pokes, great mechanisms for forwarding pics. Facebook could solve the ">?" problem for serious users without heavy-handed TOS police. And it would actually make Facebook *more* fun for the giggly users, because developer incentives would be better to create more glittery quizzical pokes for them. I do agree that it's a branding challenge. But..." - Stanislav Shalunov
"Jen: Socialization, as in becoming socialist like the teacher, is, of course, harmful.
Having friends and peers who inspire you is very important for most people, because people tend to define their goals and references relative to peers. Which is why being able to read a book a week or do elementary algebra or program a simple game are supposed to be achievements for kids her age rather than matter of course. Randomly selected peer group is, of course, less desirable than one she can choose." - Stanislav Shalunov
btw, compare to medieval apprenticeship: not paid (but fed) by master, doing hard work, all for gaining experience. - 9000
"The problem on Facebook is worse than on a typical web 2.0 site.
Facebook wants serious and useful apps, but they can't exist while squeezed out by more viral giggly apps." - Stanislav Shalunov
"Facebook already provides self-tagging tools (interests, favorite books, etc.). Just a touch over 1% of Facebook users understand this. Even many geeks can't figure out that commas in Facebook separate tags that you can search on by clicking.
Regardless, the number of disjoint categories needs to be minimized to maximize potential app reach, which is a developer incentive, and competition in each category." - Stanislav Shalunov
"The employee produces as much value as the boss (none), but the boss gets a small salary and a full benefits package.
Whether kids really aren't capable of doing anything useful is open for debate. In any case, aiming at doing useless crud is guaranteed not to produce any value. Might as well not bother." - Stanislav Shalunov
New metrics will include 7 and 30-day stats, pageviews, and number of API calls. Old metrics accelerated the evolution of apps, and new metrics will only add to this. - Stanislav Shalunov
When a larger than usual set of lawyers develops universal VC funding documents, they end up with documents that appear to satisfy no-one. This is too bad, because the idea of standard financing documents is great. I wonder if you could make each documen - Stanislav Shalunov
