Hivemapper uses machine vision to transform airborne video into a high definition living 3D map providing the world’s most important organizations the tools to travel through time and automatically detect changes.
As a CMU grad it was kind of a gut punch when I heard about this. However, I'm confident that the CMU robotics program will be just fine in the long run.
The thing that worries me more is if this makes universities afraid of partnering with companies like Uber in the future.
I'm a CMU grad as well. And CMU has a long and storied history of being raided for talent like this. 40 at once is unusually big, but this story plays out regularly.
It's good for the profs, it's mostly good for the school, and it's part of why we have such a good reputation in industry -- so it's good for alums like you and me personally, as well.
With that said, sure, 40 is a lot. But the Robotics Institute will recover.
I think some increased consideration of public/private partnerships can only be a good thing. They generally seem to benefit the private side of the partnership from this example and others.
They can be afraid if they want. What are they going to do about it? Faculty will want to do it. If the administration forbids that, they will not attract good faculty.
Yeah, he's right. Lots of dispensaries take credit cards. Most do by flying under the radar or just lying on their application. Some merchant services providers are willing to work knowingly with marijuana businesses, but they are taking a risk doing it.
Getting a card-not-present account (which is what you would want) is even harder. As far as I know nobody has done it in a legit way.
Background: I'm the co-founder of Marvina (https://marvina.com) and I've been trying to figure out payments for almost a year. There's reason to be optimistic, but so far nothing big has broken.
Absolutely! We have our eyes on topicals, edibles, and concentrates. That's really where the market is moving. Look out for an edibles only Marvina box soon!
Until then I'd recommend docGreen's cannabis infused creams. I think you can pick them up at SPARC in San Francisco.
That makes sense. And until things improve on the legal front, it seems wise for customers to stay cash-only anyway. I know I do even though the dispensary I use takes credit cards.
And I understand the part about too many choices being overwhelming. My dispensary has 30-40 varieties and I often just stand there and stare at the board.
But, probably not a service I'd use. I have several convenient choices on my way home from work and being at home for a delivery is less convenient. But I can see it being very beneficial to people that might be home-bound and need their medicine. Best of luck.
Look into "high risk merchant accounts". Quite a few CC processors specialize in it. Porn shops, gun shops, marijuana dispensaries, etc, all fall under that umbrella.
Despite the derogatory name, I actually doubt these kind of businesses present a higher than normal financial risk. For example, all gun purchase undergo FBI's NICS background check, so I suspect that gun shops have a lower rate of CC fraud compared to other retailers. As for porn shops, Guy Ritchie says it better than me:
Tom: Listen to this one: you open a company called the "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club".
Soap: You what?
Tom: You take out an advert in the back page of some gay mag, advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos. You sell it with, I dunno, "does what no other dildo can do until now", "the latest and greatest in sexual technology", "guaranteed results or your money back", all that bollocks. Now, these dils cost twenty-five quid a pop. That's a snip for the amount of pleasure they're gonna give the recipients. But they send their cheques to the other company name – nothing offensive, er, "Bobbie's Bits" or something – for twenty-five quid. You take that twenty-five quid, you stick it in the bank until it clears. Now, this is the smart bit. You send back the cheque for twenty-five pound from the other company name, "Arse Tickler's Faggots Fan Club", saying we're sorry, we couldn't get the supplies from America because they ran out of stock. Now, you see how many people cash that cheque: not a single soul, because who wants their bank manager to know they tickle arse when they're not paying cheques?
This is so ironic it's laughable. The entire point of Bitcoin is that its inherent decentralization inhibits regulatory activities like determining which businesses are and are not allowed. Yet the VC-funded ecosystem sprouting up around Bitcoin is so antithetical to its thesis of decentralization that the best tooling available is increasingly more centralized. Put another way, the decentralization of Bitcoin is actively against the interest of many of the companies starting to serve its market. BitPay, Coinbase, etc. are all predicated on the assumption that customers will transact almost entirely through their centralized platforms, foregoing the many benefits of decentralization, in exchange for the convenience of a nice GUI around Bitcoin. At the end of the day, what really is the difference between Bitcoin and credit cards, if the merchants enabling websites to seamlessly accept Bitcoin are just as regulatory as the credit card companies they are seeking to displace?
It just seems so backwards to me. I could write a longer post on this but it's way off topic.
Hivemapper uses machine vision to transform airborne video into a high definition living 3D map providing the world’s most important organizations the tools to travel through time and automatically detect changes.
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