Elaine Ou writes about Bitcoin, finance, and tech labor, with occasional posts on startups and programming.
HN cites her posts on settlement finality and tech worker supply as sources, while one commenter criticizes her conduct around a guest post and others dispute her claims.
> 85K new H1B's a year aren't enough to depress wages when the population of the US is 300M+.
Well, this is obviously false.
Compare these numbers from 2017 ( https://elaineou.com/2017/08/26/the-mystery-of-the-vanishing-tech-workers/ )
> According to this Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, 74% of Silicon Valley tech workers are foreign-born immigrants. A decade ago, 36% of Silicon Valley tech workers were born abroad. In 2000, only 29% were.
> Tech industry employment has increased from about 300,000 jobs in 2007 to 400,000 in 2016, so even though we created 100,000 engineering positions in the last decade, we’ve also displaced 88,000 domestic engineers.
"74% of the employment pool just isn't enough people to make a dent in salaries" is not an argument that can pass the laugh test.
We would do well to remember that BitTorrent came from Mojo Nation, which attempted to tokenize distribution long before Filecoin and the like.
Ultimately, "too cheap to meter" was the problem they encountered, so they stripped out the tit-for-tat portion and Bittorrent was released.
https://elaineou.com/2017/10/14/the-transaction-costs-of-tokenizing-everything/
Here is Elaine Ou's blog: http://elaineou.com/
After being told not to talk about this stuff, she thought she'd get someone else to guest-blog it for her (which she then published on her blog): https://archive.is/LBBC2
The arrogance and lack of self-awareness of these "creative entrepreneurs" defies belief.
I agree with your post x100000. I loved Flightcar when they first started: http://elaineou.com/2013/11/25/free-airport-parking-relayrides-vs-flightcar/
As an early-stage startup, they had no choice but to provide fantastic service. Now it seems like they sacrificed customer service for growth.
It's a feature that creates certain limitations in utility, as this article from Elaine Ou elaborates on:
https://elaineou.com/2016/08/01/the-value-of-settlement-finality/
How Google’s Web Crawler Bypasses Paywalls
https://elaineou.com/2016/02/19/how-to-use-chrome-extensions-to-bypass-paywalls/