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The idea that “it takes money to make money” is the thinking of financially unsophisticated people. It does not mean that they’re not intelligent. They have simply not learned the science of money making money. Money is only an idea. If you want more money, simply change your thinking. Every self-made person started small with an idea, and then turned it into something big. The same applies to investing. It takes only a few dollars to start and grow it into something big. I meet so many people who spend their lives chasing the big deal, or trying to amass a lot of money to get into a big deal, but to me that is foolish. Too often I have seen unsophisticated investors put their large nest egg into one deal and lose most of it rapidly. They may have been good workers, but they were not good investors. Education and wisdom about money are important. Start early. Buy a book. Go to a seminar. Practice. Start small. I turned $5,000 cash into a one-million-dollar asset producing $5,000 a month cash flow in less than six years. But I started learning as a kid. I encourage you to learn, because it’s not that hard. In fact, it’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it. I think I have made my message clear. It’s what is in your head that determines what is in your hands. Money is only an idea. There is a great book called Think and Grow Rich. The title is not Work Hard and Grow Rich. Learn to have money work hard for you, and your life will be easier and happier. Today, don’t play it safe. Play it smart.
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Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad)
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possibility is that the crisis happened partly because the economic models of the mainstream rendered that outcome ostensibly so unlikely in theory that they ended up making it far more likely in practice. The insouciance encouraged by the rational-expectations and efficient-market hypotheses made regulators and investors careless. As Minsky argued, stability destabilizes. This is an aspect of what George Soros, the successful speculator and innovative economic thinker, calls ‘reflexivity’: the way human beings think determines the reality in which they live.5 Naive economics helps cause unstable economies. Meanwhile,
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Martin Wolf (The Shifts and the Shocks: What we've learned – and have still to learn – from the financial crisis)
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A bubble starts when any group of stocks, in this case those associated with the excitement of the Internet, begin to rise. The updraft encourages more people to buy the stocks, which causes more TV and print coverage, which causes even more people to buy, which creates big profits for early Internet stockholders. The successful investors tell you at cocktail parties how easy it is to get rich, which causes the stocks to rise further, which pulls in larger and larger groups of investors. But the whole mechanism is a kind of Ponzi scheme where more and more credulous investors must be found to buy the stock from the earlier investors. Eventually, one runs out of greater fools.
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Malkiel Burton
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While we might expect to see venture capital develop further in an increasingly intangible economy, it is not clear that governments can or should do much more to promote it than they already do. As Josh Lerner showed in The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2012), once tax breaks or subsidies for venture capital get beyond a certain level, they tend to encourage dumb investments (since the tax gain on its own is enough for the investors to profit); since the entire point of venture capital is smart investment, very large tax breaks are self-defeating. For a country to grow its venture capital sector, time and favorable framework conditions are more important than additional subsidies.
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Jonathan Haskel (Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy)
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The modern capitalist economy must constantly increase production if it is to survive, like a shark that must swim or suffocate. Yet it’s not enough just to produce. Somebody must also buy the products, or industrialists and investors alike will go bust. To prevent this catastrophe and to make sure that people will always buy whatever new stuff industry produces, a new kind of ethic appeared: consumerism. Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured. Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (‘Just do it!’) to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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A golden visa is a permanent residency visa issued to individuals who invest, often through the purchase of property, a certain sum of money into the issuing country.
The United States EB-5 visa program requires overseas applicants to invest a minimum of anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million, depending on the location of the project, and requires at least 10 jobs to be either created or preserved.[22] When these criteria are met, the applicant and their family become eligible for a green card. There is an annual cap of 10,000 applications under the EB-5 program.[citation needed] The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has offered its EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program since 1990. It is designed to encourage foreign investment in infrastructure projects in the U.S., particularly in Targeted Employment Areas (TEA), high unemployment areas. The funds are channeled through agencies called regional centers, now designated only by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The funding opportunities allow the investor to make a sound financial investment and obtain a U.S. “Green Card.
A large majority of users of such programs are wealthy Chinese seeking legal security and a better quality of life outside of their home country.
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Wikipedia: Immigrant investor programs
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The question I've always had about this army of young people with seemingly endless career options who wind up in finance is: What happens to them next? One moment they're young people: They have young people's idealism and hope to live a meaningful life. The next they're essentially old people, at work gaming ratings companies, designing securities to fail so they can make a killing off the investors they dupe into buying them, rigging various markets at the expense of the wider society, and encouraging all sorts of people to do stuff with their capital and their com panies that they should never do.
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Anonymous
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Slack had spent nearly five years and $ 17 million on development prior to its public launch in February 2014. Just two months later, before the end of April, it had raised another $ 43 million. Both of these investments took place before Slack had proven its revenue model and started generating significant sales. Slack’s freemium business model (offering a free service and encouraging users to upgrade later to becoming paying customers) meant that even after two months of rapid user growth, the company hadn’t proven its ability to make money. Fortunately for Slack and its investors, this aggressiveness paid off. As the initial wave of free users started converting to paid, Slack was able to raise an additional $ 120 million six months later to accelerate its growth even further.
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Reid Hoffman (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies)
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They invited a large investor, Coca-Cola, to take over a plot of land in Pulkovo Heights and install high-capacity power and communications cables, hoping that other companies would follow suit. It worked. After Coca-Cola developed their piece of land, Gillette came, then Wrigley, and then some pharmaceutical companies. An economic zone thus took shape within the city, where total investment now exceeds half a billion dollars. Furthermore, with the Committee’s encouragement, the city’s infrastructure began to be modernized to create the conditions necessary for successful business. The first major deal that Putin supported was the completion of a fiber-optic cable to Copenhagen. This project had been initiated back in the Soviet era but never completed. Now the efforts were successful, providing St. Petersburg with world-class international telephone connections.
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Vladimir Putin (First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia's President Vladimir Putin)
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We’ll see how reducing the jaw-dropping levels of CEO salaries isn’t actually the most effective way to reform pay to benefit society. We’ll understand how an investor selling his shares in the short term can encourage businesses to act more long term. We’ll learn how a company using cash to buy back shares rather than investing it may create long-run value, not just for its shareholders, but also the economy as a whole.
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Alex Edmans (Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit – Updated and Revised)
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The adversary politics thesis contends that attempts to generate long-term solutions to problems are thwarted by a system that encourages an adversary relationship between the two main political parties, with those parties vying with one another for the all-or-nothing spoils of a general election victory.39 Investors and managers are unable to plan ahead because the
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Philip Norton (British Polity, The, CourseSmart eTextbook)
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In the beginning, repeating a habit is essential to build up evidence of your desired identity. As you latch on to that new identity, however, those same beliefs can hold you back from the next level of growth. When working against you, your identity creates a kind of "pride" that encourages you to deny your weak spots and prevents you from truly growing. This is one of the greatest downsides of building habits...
One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are. In the words of investor Paul Graham, "keep your identity small." The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you. If you tie everything up in being the point guard or the partner at the firm or whatever else, then the loss of that facet of your life will wreck you. If you're a vegan and then develop a health condition that forces you to change your diet, you'll have an identity crisis on your hands. When you cling too tightly to one identity, you become brittle. Lose that one thing and you lose yourself...
When chosen effectively, an identity can be flexible rather than brittle. Like water flowing around an obstacle, your identity works with the changing circumstances rather than against them. p247
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James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
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After all, the Fed has driven down rates with the intention of encouraging investors to take on more risk. Yet those who embrace low yields, poor credits, thin liquidity and even currency mismatches today may discover, when market conditions deteriorate, that the modest yield pick-up proves poor compensation for future losses. Mr. Piketty can rest easy. In an age when risk-free assets yield little or nothing, the determination of the wealthy to earn somewhat more will, in due course, do more to restore equality than his proposed taxes. A free market solution to a political problem–who says capitalism is failing?
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Edward Chancellor (Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle: A Money Manager’s Reports 2002-15)
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What became known as ‘the salad oil scandal’ was a textbook case of management incompetence and stupidity, and investors abandoned the company in droves. The 33-year-old Buffett had kept his eye on the scandal since it broke, but he waited months to start buying. And he started building his investment—the best of the Partnership—during a particularly trying time for him and his family, as his father Howard lay hospital-ridden in the final weeks of his life in April 1964. To the extent he was known at all at the time, Buffett was known for his ability to find quantitative bargains among the semi-anonymous flotsam and jetsam of American capitalism, but American Express was an extremely well-known company. Moreover, Buffett proceeded to write a remarkable letter to Clark in which he rather breezily absolved Amex management of any responsibility for the scandal, encouraged it to use shareholder money (which included Buffett’s) to pay creditors harmed by the scandal, and more or less encouraged Clark to forget the whole thing. Finally, and most importantly, Buffett continued adding to his American Express position long after the scandal had diminished in importance. By the time he sold his position years later, American Express had become the most important individual contributor to the results of the Buffett Partnership and arguably the biggest turning point in Buffett’s career.
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Brett Gardner (Buffett's Early Investments: A new investigation into the decades when Warren Buffett earned his best returns)
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The government grants tax and legal loopholes to real estate investors to encourage them to do a job that the government can’t.
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Garrett Sutton (Loopholes of Real Estate: Secrets of Successful Real Estate Investing (Rich Dad's Advisors (Paperback)))
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Accordingly, under Islam, either people invest with risk or suffer loss by keeping their money idle. Islam encourages the notion of higher risks and higher returns and promotes it by leaving no other avenue available to investors. The objective here is that high-risk investments provide a stimulus to the economy and encourage entrepreneurs to maximise their efforts to make them succeed, with appropriate benefits to the community.
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Brian Kettell (Islamic Finance in a Nutshell: A Guide for Non-Specialists (The Wiley Finance Series))
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Targeted transportation options like Bridj are designed to take cars off the road. Investors, at least, see the potential; Bridj just announced it raised $4 million in funding . And the company is poised to get permits it needed from Boston and Brookline without any opposition. (A hearing on the license in Cambridge is expected next month.) It’s reasonable for city governments to keep tabs on any disruptions that new apps create. While the Boston City Council’s move to ban the parking app Haystack was at best premature, fears that the app might encourage churlish behavior were well-placed. Occasional problems experienced by users of Airbnb, the online home-rental marketplace that the Boston council plans to tackle in an upcoming hearing, deserve a close look.
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Anonymous
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There is probably no worse investment strategy than following the conventional wisdom with a time-lag, and that is precisely what many small investors do - often with the encouragement of their advisers.
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John Kay (The Long and the Short of It - Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Are Not in)
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The next day, Adam met with Jamie Dimon on the forty-third floor of JPMorgan’s headquarters. Adam told Dimon that he wasn’t sure there was any way forward for him as CEO. Dimon agreed. No one scandal or decision had taken Neumann down, but it had been a year full of one blemish after another on the heels of a decade in which he could do no wrong. “How could this happen?” Adam told Dimon, according to a person familiar with the conversation. “I did everything you told me to do.” “Adam,” Dimon said. “You did nothing that I told you to.” This wasn’t strictly true. JPMorgan, SoftBank, and WeWork’s other investors had enabled and encouraged Adam for years. It was only when his erratic behavior threatened their own reputations that they turned on him.
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Reeves Wiedeman (Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork)
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Established Sino-Burmese businessmen continue to remain at the helm of Myanmar's economy, where the Chinese minority have been transformed almost overnight into a garishly distinctive prosperous business community. Much of the foreign investment capital into the Burmese economy has been from Mainland Chinese investors and channeled through Burmese Chinese business networks for new startup businesses or foreign acquisitions. Many members of the Burmese Chinese business community act as agents for Mainland and overseas Chinese investors outside of Myanmar. In 1988, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) came to power, and gradually loosened the government's role in the economy, encouraging private sector growth and foreign investment. This liberalization of state's role in the economy, if slight and uneven, nonetheless gave Burmese Chinese-led businesses extra space to expand and reassert their economic clout. Today, virtually all of Myanmar's retail, wholesale and shipping firms are in Chinese hands. For example, Sein Gayha, a major Burmese retailer that began in Yangon's Chinatown in 1985, is owned by a Burmese Hakka family. Moreover, ethnic Chinese control the nations four of the five largest commercial banks, Myanmar Universal Bank, Yoma Bank, Myanmar Mayflower Bank, and the Asia Wealth Bank. Today, Myanmar's ethnic Chinese community are now at the forefront of opening up the country's economy, especially towards Mainland China as an international overseas Chinese economic outpost. The Chinese government has been very proactive in engaging with the overseas Chinese diaspora and using China's soft power to help the Burmese Chinese community stay close to their roots in order to foster business ties.[9] Much of the foreign investment from Mainland China now entering Myanmar is being channeled through overseas Chinese bamboo networks. Many members of the Burmese Chinese business community often act as agents for expatriate and overseas Chinese investors outside of Myanmar.
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Wikipedia: Chinese people in Myanmar
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These days company annual reports can be huge documents, full of detailed information, much of which is of limited interest to the average investor. However, do focus on directors' shareholdings - any changes compared with last year, the level of borrowings and particularly the comments of the chairman and the CEO on future prospects. A comment such as 'We are now well placed to benefit from any improvement in the world economy' usually means don't expect much improvement in the short term. However, comments like 'current order intake and profitability are running well ahead of last year' are much more encouraging.
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John Lee (How to Make a Million – Slowly: Guiding Principles from a Lifetime of Investing (Financial Times Series))
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Still, Frederic Allen and his partners recognized that the markets were changing. Given its Boston roots, Lee Higginson lacked the national networks of Morgan or National City, a leading commercial bank. The firm needed someone to establish stronger connections, first with new companies whose securities would appeal to investors, and then throughout the United States with the investors themselves. Every American already knew Jack Morgan. They were getting to know National City’s chairman, Charles Mitchell, a former electrical goods salesman, who had been encouraging his brokers with sales contests, high commissions, and motivational speeches. Lee Higginson needed someone to join this fray, and to introduce the firm’s name and the companies it discovered to the public. It wouldn’t hurt if this man resembled Fred Astaire
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Frank Partnoy (The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century)
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Offer Incentives to Get All-Important Early Wins For most start-ups, creating incentives for early investors is a sensible path. Whether through a seeder or founder’s shares, preferential terms can align the manager and early adopters to encourage growth. As the industry faces scrutiny on fees, the opportunity to offer something that clients are actively seeking is a win-win proposition. If a manager canvasses a wide range of potential investors, he will encounter both supporters and critics of seeding and discounted shares. Among the pools of capital invested in hedge funds, the fund of funds community tends to embrace founder’s shares more actively than others. In doing so, funds of funds have a place in the industry ecosystem by providing R&D for the industry. Except for the fortunate few whose brand allows a mega-launch, a start-up needs flag wavers in its corner to create positive signaling effects and branding. Both seeders and founder’s share investors can help.
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Ted Seides (So You Want to Start a Hedge Fund: Lessons for Managers and Allocators)
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You would be right in thinking the tax law isn’t fair. And it’s not meant to be fair. It’s meant to encourage certain activities. The primary activities that the tax code encourages are business and investing. Business owners and investors get certain privileges.
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Tom Wheelwright (Rich Dad Advisors: Tax-Free Wealth, 2nd Edition: How to Build Massive Wealth by Permanently Lowering Your Taxes)
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Throughout history, rulers have run up debts that won’t come due until long after their own reigns are over, leaving it to their successors to pay the bill. Printing money and buying financial assets (mostly bonds) holds interest rates down, which stimulates borrowing and buying. Those investors holding bonds are encouraged to sell them. The low interest rates also encourage investors, businesses, and individuals to borrow and invest in higher-returning assets, getting what they want through monthly payments they can afford.
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Ray Dalio (Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail)
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Understanding and dealing correctly with the trade-off between risk and return is a fundamental, but poorly understood, challenge faced by all gamblers and investors. If anyone knew whether physical prediction at roulette was possible, it should be Richard Feynman. I asked him, “Is there any way to beat the game of roulette?” When he said there wasn’t, I was relieved and encouraged. This suggested that no one had yet worked out what I believed was possible. With this incentive, I began a series of experiments.
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Edward O. Thorp (A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market)
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Why was I bent on encouraging people to change their lives? Because I've watched my generation stop reading books, stop reading the newspaper, stop voting in local elections? Because I've watched money/salary become a proxy for respect, and then a synonym for respect, and then the only kind of respect that counts? Because I have seen us judge books we have not read, politicians we have not heard, musicians we have not listened to, referendums we have not debated, and fellow citizens we have not met? Because I have seen us torn apart by jealousy for what others our age have accomplished, rather than celebrating those accomplishments? Because I have seen us glorify those who make decisions over those who enact decisions, prefer being a consultant to being fully engaged, being an investor to being invested in, being an advisor over being politically involved, being an expert over being partisan, being a news analyst over being a news gatherer--all in fear of the inflexible boredom of commitment?
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Po Bronson (What Should I Do with My Life?: The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question)
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The variables which were apt for management by central authorities were interest rates and taxation, which he proposed that governments should adjust in order to stimulate investment and to seek full employment. However, he said little of emergency public works, and nothing about fiscal methods of demand management. He did not recommend increasing the government’s current expenditure by running a budget deficit to meet a deficiency of demand. He gave no encouragement to profligate finance ministers. He urged that additional government expenditure should be on capital account and financed from a separate capital budget while so far as possible the regular budget should be kept in balance. He suggested that full employment might be maintained by redistribution of income. If wealth was more equitably dispersed in the population, effective demand would be stimulated and would thus help capital growth. As the scarcity of capital diminished, investors would be rewarded less. He never believed that state planning would eliminate economic instability. He saw national economies as inherently wobbling: they were susceptible to rational management, but with irrational elements.73
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Richard Davenport-Hines (Universal Man: The Lives of John Maynard Keynes)
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the corporate investor became an almost essential part of Broadway--which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But when the money tries to protect it's investment...by getting involved with the creative content of the shows, unhealthy mutations occur. ...Our times encourage another sort of people--people with new money who are essentially interested in more money, not the arts.
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Sam Wasson (Fosse)
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Starting at the end of 2014 and for the first half of 2015, the Ethereum Foundation encouraged battle testing of its network,
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Chris Burniske (Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond)
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Getting to fifty-fifty is incredibly complex and nuanced, requiring many detailed solutions that will take decades to fully play out. To accelerate the process, change needs to start at the top. Like Stewart Butterfield, CEOs need to make hiring and retaining women an explicit priority. In addition, here is the bare minimum of what we can do at an individual and a systemic level: First of all, people, be nice to each other. Treat one another with respect and dignity, including those of the opposite sex.That should be pretty simple. Don’t enable assholes. Stop making excuses for bad behavior, or ignoring it. CEOs must embrace and champion the need to reach a fair representation of gender within their companies, and develop a comprehensive plan to get there. Be long-term focused, not short-term. It may take three weeks to find a white man for the job, but three months to find a woman. Those three months could save three years of playing catch-up in the future. Invest in not just diversity but inclusion. Even if your company is small, everything counts. And take the time to educate your employees about why this is important. Companies need to appoint more women to their boards. And boards need to hold company leadership to account to get to fifty-fifty in their employee ranks, starting with company executives. Venture capital firms need to hire more women partners, and limited partners should pressure them to do so and, at the very least, ask them what their plans around diversity are. Investors, both men and women, need to start funding more women and diverse teams, period. LPs need to fund more women VCs, who can establish new firms with new cultural norms. Stop funding partnerships that look and act the same. Most important, stop blaming everybody else for the problem or pretending that it is too hard for us to solve. It’s time to look in the mirror. This is an industry, after all, that prides itself on disruption and revolutionary new ways of thinking. Let’s put that spirit of innovation and embrace of radical change to good use. Seeing a more inclusive workforce in Silicon Valley will encourage more girls and women studying computer science now.
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Emily Chang (Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley)
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With the money they raised, the Ethereum team was also able to test the network before launch in a way that Satoshi and his small group of supporters were not able to. Starting at the end of 2014 and for the first half of 2015, the Ethereum Foundation encouraged battle testing of its network, both in a grassroots bug bounty program and in formal security audits that involved professional third-party software security firms.
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Chris Burniske (Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond)
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Another appropriate policy response limits investment alternatives to a well-structured set of choices. Government-provided tax advantages encourage individual participation in defined contribution programs. Suppose the government were to award tax benefits only to accounts that invest in low-cost, market-mimicking funds. By restricting tax-advantaged investments to passive vehicles, investors face far fewer opportunities to make investment mistakes. Government regulation might address market-timing issues by limiting the number and frequency of moves between funds. Educational efforts might deal with the challenges of asset allocation, encouraging individuals to adopt investment programs that fit their specific risk profiles and time horizons. Acting in loco parentis, the government could create powerful incentives to adopt passively managed, appropriately allocated investment programs
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David F. Swensen (Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment)